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Overview of the Processing Steps for a Web Server and CGI
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You will read about these tricks and how to maintain state (associate the web user from the last action to the next action) in this chapter. Fortunately, there are some tricks built into FileMaker Pro and the Web Companion commands to check for ownership of a record whether on a network, an intranet, or the Internet. When publishing a FileMaker Pro database on the web, you must carefully analyze that you have not assumed record locking will take place. Because the web is stateless it does not provide this protection. This is called record locking and allows all users to see the same record in a multiuser situation but only gives to one user permission to make changes to a record. The client-server model has features to prevent more than one user from trying to alter the same piece of information at the same time.
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You can see practically immediately any changes you or another user makes to a database record using a server and clients. The only delay in the data exchange from a user's client computer to FileMaker Server is waiting for the user cache (temporary locally stored data) to be written to the server. The communication between FileMaker Server hosted files and FileMaker Pro clients is quite different from web-published databases. You need to plan carefully for the actions of users who will not see changes until the browser window is updated by making a new request or refreshing a web page.
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You are not connected to Web Companion or FileMaker Pro continuously. The request is processed and a text page and/or images are displayed in the browser and the connection is stopped. You make a request from the browser that is sent to the web server, in this case, the Web Companion API. After each connection or hit is completed, you are disconnected from the server although you may not think so.Īs you design your web-published FileMaker Pro databases, contemplate the statelessness of HTTP. You can specify in your browser preferences how many multiple simultaneous connections to make (four is the default maximum). These connections are sometimes called hits. A typical web page may have multiple requests for text, image, document, or sound files. After a required file is returned, the connection to the server is broken until another request is made. A request is made from the browser and sent to the server. Most links you click probably start with " HTTP is the communication and transfer protocol found in the Uniform Resource Locator of the link. There is a two-way communication between the browser and the web server using the platform-independent Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Your browser combines them and translates these into the documents you see on the World Wide Web. The web server returns and temporarily transfers formatted text pages, files, movies, graphics, and sounds to your computer. The Web Companion will be loaded, as well as the other extensions, when FileMaker Pro is started and it is configured from the Application Preferences, Plug-Ins tab.Ī web server receives requests from a browser when the user types in the location or clicks on a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) link.
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Web Companion is called WEBCOMPN.FMX or webcmpn.fmx and is installed in the SYSTEMS directory of the FileMaker directory if you are using the Windows operating system.
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The Web Companion icon is shown in Figure 5.1. This API file is placed in the FileMaker Extensions folder and is called Web Companion on the Macintosh. You should always use the most recent version of the Web Companion plug-in. Web Companion has been available since FileMaker Pro 4.0 under various revisions, but only since FileMaker Pro 5.x have the necessary commands for XML publishing been available. The Web Companion API is designed to be both a web server and a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) application. Web Companion is a plug-in or, more specifically, an application programming interface (API) used by FileMaker Pro to web publish your databases. 5.1 Setting Up Web Companion for XML Requests
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