Updating DocuSign Envelope Templates from FileMaker

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When we first released our fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition) solution we included support for working with DocuSign Templates. DocuSign Templates are perfect for almost any Docusign workflow that you do over and over again, for example sending the same document/s to different recipients such as non-disclosure agreements and rental agreements.

DocuSign Templates allow you to include one or more documents and configure placeholder roles (e.g. landlord and tenant for a rental agreement) which you then assign recipients to – the recipients and signers will likely change every time you use the template.

For Templates that don’t change the fmESignature Link solution can be used to quickly create a DocuSign envelope and assign recipients to the roles and send the envelope via the DocuSign API. However there may be situations where you need to replace one or more documents in a Template with a dynamically generated file – the documents in the template act as placeholders for the actual document you wish to send.

Recently we have worked with a number of medical practice clients that wished to automate the sending of various forms (e.g. new patient consent forms) that they were previously sending manually using DocuSign Templates and copying data from their internal FileMaker solution. Some of their Templates required the user to create PDF files from their FileMaker CRM and replace files from their Template with these FileMaker generated PDFs which contained information specific to each patient.

We were able to extend the functionality of the fmESignature Link file to perform the following actions:

  1. create a new Envelope using the DocuSign Template and set the status to ‘Draft’ so that it is not sent
  2. create multiple PDF files from FileMaker and replace the placeholder files in the Envelope with these PDF files by updating the Envelope Documents
  3. we also were able to remove roles that were not required for individual Envelopes (for example where a patient did not have a partner that also needed to sign an agreement)
  4. once the Envelope had been updated with the new PDF files and any redundant signer roles removed we then changed the status of the Envelope to ‘sent’ and the email was then sent by DocuSign to the first recipient/signer

Using the power of the FileMaker Platform we were able to automate this workflow that previously involved multiple manual steps:

  1. login to DocuSign and create a new Envelope from a Template
  2. create the PDF files from FileMaker and uploaded to DocuSign in place of the placeholder files
  3. manually enter the names and email addresses for all recipients/roles and remove any roles that weren’t required
  4. manually send the envelope from DocuSign

down to a single button click in their FileMaker CRM.

If you would like to discuss integrating DocuSign with your FileMaker solution please get in touch to arrange a free consultation to discuss your requirements.

Databuzz 2025 End of Year Xmas Sale – 20% Off All Licenses

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The Databuzz End of Year Xmas Sale is now on. We only have one sale each year and for the next 2 weeks you can save 20% on all Product Licenses including:

Use the coupon XMAS2025 at checkout on any purchase and the 20% discount will be applied to your order (excludes Maintenance products). The sale runs until the end of the day on December 31, 2025 (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). Click here to start shopping.

Free trial versions are available for all of our products. You can also get 20% off our custom integration services if you need assistance with integrating one of our products into your existing Claris FileMaker solution.

All our prices are in Australian dollars – if you’re purchasing from outside of Australia you’ll also get to take advantage of the low Australian dollar.

The Benefits of FileMaker Lightspeed Integrations

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In 2025 Databuzz has completed a number of integration projects connecting custom FileMaker business applications with Lightspeed, the popular point of sale and payments platform for retail and hospitality businesses. Businesses with a physical retail presence will need a point of sale (POS) system with a cash register/credit card terminal. They might also be using a custom FileMaker business app that offers more functionality than off-the-shelf POS systems can provide.

We were approached to help a number of businesses get their FileMaker solution talking to Lightspeed, including a ski hire shop that uses FileMaker to capture all the details required for hiring ski equipment that a POS system isn’t designed to cater for. This includes the contact details, the details for each piece of equipment that is hired, as well as the dates for the hire and getting the customer to sign the hire agreement etc. Once all these details had been captured using FileMaker Go on an iPad staff would then have to create a new sale in the Lightspeed POS system and process the payment which involves lots of double data entry and wasted staff time.

Using the Lightspeed API we were able to eliminate all the double data entry between their FileMaker app and Lightspeed. Now staff can click a button to push an order captured in FileMaker to Lightspeed as a new sale and quickly capture the payment.

To map the FileMaker order to a Lightspeed sale we had to first download some setup data from their Lightspeed account, including:

  • details for their Lightspeed account
  • details for the Lightspeed shop
  • the list of Lightspeed Tax Categories
  • the list of Lightspeed Employees
  • the list of Lightspeed cash registers
  • the list of Lightspeed Inventory Items

These details were required in order to create a new sale via the Lightspeed API – we were able to map the FileMaker data with the corresponding data in Lightspeed so the sale was created in Lightspeed successfully.

If you would like to discuss integrating Lightspeed with your FileMaker solution please get in touch to arrange a free consultation and discuss your requirements.

Reconnect is Back in 2025 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground

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The Reconnect Claris FileMaker Developer conference is happening again in 2025 in Melbourne, Australia at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). Building on the success of the first two conferences in Sydney and Brisbane the organising committee is excited to announce that Reconnect.Melbourne is confirmed for 16 – 17 October, 2025.

The same group of Claris Partners (Digital Fusion, Goya, uLearnIT and Databuzz) that organised the previous two Reconnect events started planning this year’s event last November, beginning with venue selections for the conference and the social night. As well the two days of conference sessions there will also be some pre-conference training courses led by industry experts Stephanie Lloyd, David Head and Paul Hutton. This is a great opportunity to expand your skills and knowledge in FileMaker development and the Claris platform.

Databuzz is proud to once again be sponsoring the conference – I’d like to give special thanks to all the other sponsors, particularly Claris, for helping to make Reconnect possible. Tickets for the conference and training days are on sale now:

https://reconnect.fm

Reconnect.Melbourne will be the only official Claris FileMaker Developer conference in the APAC region in 2025 so don’t miss out as tickets are limited. This is not just an event for those based in Australia and New Zealand – last year we had attendees from over 8 countries including Germany, Canada, USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Speaker submissions are open until Friday, 4 July so get in quick if you’re interested in presenting at the conference.

I look forward to meeting up with members of the Claris FileMaker Developer Community once again in October at the mighty MCG. 

OttoFMS Webhooks

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Back in 2023 I wrote about some options for receiving webhooks using FileMaker Server. We had just added support for Claris Connect and were also recommending Otto from Proof+Geist as another alternative to using the PHP webhook files we had supplied with our integration solutions for many years.

We found that Otto was by far the simplest and quickest way to setup a webhook receiver. It was a paid product but we thought it was well worth the price given the time you could save setting up webhooks with Otto. Last year Proof+Geist released a major update to Otto – it’s now called OttoFMS and is now also free to anyone to download and install.

While our interest was in the webhooks feature OttoFMS does a whole lot more than that. OttoFMS helps developers automate data migrations, transfer files between servers, perform offsite backups, and more. OttoFMS works with OttoDeploy to provide a complete solution for automating FileMaker Server DevOps workflows. At the Claris Engage conference earlier this year Proof+Geist were deserved winners of the Claris Innovation Excellence Award for OttoFMS.

If you’re using their Ottomatic hosting platform OttoFMS is built-in and you can organise and view all your servers in a single dashboard. You can even view your on-premise FileMaker Servers using the Ottomatic – over 1,200,000 webhooks are being received each month using OttoFMS on the Ottomatic Platform.

With the release of OttoFMS support for Otto 3 is being phased out. We’ve added support for OttoFMS to our FileMaker integration solutions and updated our support site with new articles. You can read our support guides for setting up webhooks with OttoFMS here:


There’s a great community support forum where you can ask questions which is monitored by Proof+Geist staff. Thanks Proof+Geist for making OttoFMS free for the FileMaker community and providing access to professional DevOps tools for developers of all skill levels.

Creating Apple Wallet Passes from FileMaker

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One of the main benefits of attending Claris FileMaker related developer conferences is learning about new techniques and being able to use them with your existing clients when you return. I’ve been attending FileMaker developer conferences for over 25 years and usually return home with a number of tips, tricks and techniques that I can use with new or existing client projects.

Last November I attended the EngageU European FileMaker conference in Malmö, Sweden where I gave a talk and also attended as many sessions as I could. I like to attend sessions on topics I know nothing or very little about and hopefully learn something new that might be of use in the future.

One of the sessions I was hoping to attend was called Passes, Please! FileMaker’s Journey into Apple Wallet by Javier Durá from Afterdata. Afterdata is a Claris Partner based in Valencia, Spain (one of my favourite Spanish cities) and is one of the organisers of the CodeWave Spanish FileMaker Developer conference. Luckily Javier’s session didn’t overlap with mine and I was able to attend – it was an excellent session that showed how to generate Apple Wallet Passes from FileMaker. The video for this session will appear on the EngageU YouTube channel and is worth a watch if you would like to learn about how the process of creating Apple Wallet Passes works.

When I returned home to Australia after the conference I immediately got in touch with a couple of clients that run events to see if they would be interested in offering Apple Wallet Passes and within a few days I was creating my first Pass all from FileMaker using the great sample file that Javier provided. I won’t go into the full details of what you need in order to create an Apple Wallet Pass, but at a high level these include:

  • an active Apple Developer Program membership
  • generate a Pass Type ID and create/download the required certificates
  • if you’re going to be generating the passes using FileMaker Pro you’ll need to do this on a Mac and download the signing executable from Apple
  • generate the required images to work with your Pass format
  • a FileMaker file that can generate the .json file and have this signed which creates the final Pass that can be added to the Apple Wallet

The final Apple Wallet Pass is just a signed JSON file – you generate the JSON file and the associated images then sign this to create the pass that you can then distribute to your event attendees. You can see examples of this on the Apple Developer website.

After talking with one of my clients we decided that we wanted change how the Pass files were distributed – instead of emailing them as attachments for customers to click on and then be prompted to add them to their Apple Wallet we wanted to simplify this and have a link that we could send via SMS that would open and display the Pass immediately (similar to how you get tickets from airlines, movie theatres etc). This made it easier for the FileMaker users to create and send the passes as they wouldn’t need to have the certificates and the signing app installed on their Mac – they could just click a button to generate a URL to send via email or SMS to the customer.

After some research I found a number of alternative methods to sign the passes and settled on a free PHP library that I could use to generate the json file and sign the pass using PHP dynamically. Having programmed in PHP for around 20 years this was my preferred option but there are many other options available for different programming languages to choose from here. All I needed to do was write some PHP code that used the FileMaker Data API to communicate with FileMaker Server and retrieve the attendee record and create the json file that the pkpass library would then convert into the final .pkpass file and display this for the user to add to their wallet.

To demonstrate this in action I’ve used the Reconnect conference that is taking place in October in Melbourne, Australia as my sample event. Reconnect is the only Claris FileMaker developer conference in the APAC region – as one of the conference organisers I thought this would be a cool feature to develop for attendees this year.

Here’s a screenshot of the simple FileMaker file I created to generate passes for the event (N.B. the Attendees listed here are fake):

I’ve got fields to capture the event details, such as the name, date, time and venue. I’ve used the Apple Maps API to convert the venue location into a geocode of the latitude and longitude and another API to work out the time zone offset from UTC for the event as well. I’ve also specified the RGB value for the background colour – in this example it is black.

Clicking the green button to the right of the Attendee mobile phone number generates a link like this:

https://fms.databuzz.com.au/apple_passes_demo/getPass.php?id=6E8A4828-0FB7-4F30-A0DB-67C11A7BCF1E

I’m including the FileMaker Primary Key value for the Attendee record as the id paramater. The PHP file will parse out this parameter and use the FileMaker Data API to retrieve this record and create the JSON for the Pass and then export this as a .pkpass file. When the link is opened in Safari on the iPhone it automatically appears and prompts the user to Add the Pass to their Apple Wallet:

I’m also generating a simple barcode from another field that can be used to scan the attendee’s pass and mark their record as attended when the conference starts using FileMaker Go. You can also add additional information to the back of the pass such as contact details for the event and a link to a map for the venue:

Here’s a short video showing this in action (you can also watch this on YouTube here):


If you would like to discuss creating Apple Wallet Passes with your FileMaker solution please get in touch to arrange a free consultation and discuss your requirements. If you have any questions please comment below.


Leveraging the FileMaker Admin API in Client Solutions

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When the FileMaker Admin API was first released, initially as a trial with FileMaker Server 17 and then officially with FileMaker Server 18, my curiosity was piqued and I wondered if this was something I would be able us with client solutions in the future. We already had the web Admin Console interface as well as the Command Line Interface (CLI) for administering your FileMaker Server, but these were typically used by FileMaker Server administrators and were generally not tools you would grant end users access to.

With the release of the Admin API we now had a tool that provided the ability to perform server administration functions without requiring access to the server itself. Just as the Data API provides a REST API to access to the data in your hosted FileMaker solutions the Admin API provides a REST API for managing and administering FileMaker Server.

Since the release of FileMaker Server 18 in 2019 I’ve used the Admin API to perform a number of admin related functions and allow users of hosted solutions to perform functions that previously would have required giving access to the Admin Console. Here’s a summary of how I’ve used the Admin API in my end user solutions:

Listing Connected Clients

I’ve had a number of clients that needed to generate a list of users that were currently connected – for example to compare against rostering systems to identify users that were rostered on but not actually logged on to the FileMaker solution in question. The Admin API has a List Clients endpoint which returns a list of the connected clients. You can also use the Admin API to send a message to a connected client (similar to sending a message in the Admin Console).

Backup FileMaker Server Schedules

I have a number of clients that have over 50 complex server schedules that perform a number of maintenance tasks and bulk notifications. Upgrading to a new version of FileMaker Server always involves some anxiety that the schedules will be restored successfully when I import them using the Admin Console. Using the Admin API I can also make a separate backup of these using the List Schedules endpoint and restore these if necessary.

Perform a FileMaker Server Schedule

FileMaker Server Schedules can run a number of automation tasks, including:

  • FileMaker scripts defined in hosted databases
  • system script files
  • database integrity verification

Often it makes sense to schedule these to run at a regular schedule (e.g. every 2 hours or at 11pm nightly). There are often times it doesn’t make sense to have a server schedule running on a recurring interval as it will only be required on an ad hoc basis. Using the Admin API you can now perform a schedule on demand when required – I’ve used this with a number of clients to perform complicated schedules that perform multiple tasks on demand instead of having these running needlessly every 15 minutes. I’ve setup FileMaker Pro scripts that give users the ability to perform one of these complicated server schedules as required without having to give them access to the Admin Console.

You can learn more about the FileMaker Admin API at the Claris FileMaker Admin API Guide. You can get detailed information about the API calls in the Admin API Reference. You can view the reference in a web browser on the primary machine at the following URL:

https://localhost/fmi/admin/apidoc

You can view the reference on a remote machine at the following URL:

https://host/fmi/admin/apidoc

If you’re planning to incorporate Admin API calls in your FileMaker solutions I highly recommend downloading the free FM-Admin API Tool that Mike Duncan from Soliant Consulting has generously made available. It includes examples for working with all the Admin API endpoints and can save you many hours getting familiar with making Admin API requests.

If you’re using the Admin API with your client solutions in interesting ways please comment below and share your experiences.

Databuzz 2024 End of Year Xmas Sale – 20% Off All Licenses

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The Databuzz End of Year Xmas Sale is now on. We only have one sale each year and for the next 2 weeks you can save 20% on all Product Licenses including:

Use the coupon XMAS2024 at checkout on any purchase and the 20% discount will be applied to your order (excludes Maintenance products). The sale runs until the end of the day on December 31, 2024 (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). Click here to start shopping.

Free trial versions are available for all of our products. You can also get 20% off our custom integration services if you need assistance with integrating one of our products into your existing Claris FileMaker solution.

All our prices are in Australian dollars – if you’re purchasing from outside of Australia you’ll also get to take advantage of the low Australian dollar.

fmMMS Updated for Telstra Messaging API v3

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fmMMS, our FileMaker solution that lets you send and receive MMS messages from the Claris FileMaker Platform, has been updated to support the Telstra Messaging API v3. The Telstra Messaging API v2 was switched off on 31 August 2024 and all users should now be using the v3 API.

You can download a trial version of fmMMS to test with the Telstra Messaging API v3 Gateway from the from the Databuzz website. You can try out Messaging API v3 with Telstra’s no-commitment free trial and send up to 100 messages to up to 10 recipients with no time limit, no obligation and no billing information required.

More information on using the Telstra Messaging API v3 Gateway with fmMMS is available on our support site.

fmSMS Updated for Telstra Messaging API v3

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fmSMS, our FileMaker solution for sending and receiving SMS messages from the Claris FileMaker Platform, has been updated to support the Telstra Messaging API v3. The Telstra Messaging API v2 was switched off on 31 August 2024 and all users should now be using the v3 API.

You can download a trial version of fmSMS to test with the Telstra Messaging API v3 Gateway from the from the Databuzz website. You can try out Messaging API v3 with Telstra’s no-commitment free trial and send up to 100 messages to up to 10 recipients with no time limit, no obligation and no billing information required.

More information on using the Telstra Messaging API v3 Gateway with fmSMS is available on our support site.