ODBC and JDBC Guide

Chapter 3 | Installing FileMaker ODBC client drivers 14
Configuring the DSN (Windows)
To configure the ODBC client driver:
1. In the ODBC Data Source Administrator, select the System DSN or User DSN tab. You create
a DSN for each FileMaker database file you want to access as a data source.
2. Click Add.
3. Select FileMaker ODBC, and click Finish.
4. Click Next.
5. For Name, enter a name that will be meaningful to others accessing the FileMaker data source.
For Description, enter an optional description of the FileMaker data source. Click Next.
6. For Host:
1 If you’re connecting to a database file hosted by FileMaker Pro on your local machine, enter
localhost or the IP address 127.0.0.1.
1 If you’re connecting to a database file hosted by FileMaker Server over a network, enter the
IP address of the FileMaker Server.
If you have enabled sharing via ODBC/JDBC in the host application, you can select Connect
to host to obtain the names of available databases. Click Next.
Otherwise, click Finish to save your data source information.
7. For Database, select a database from the list of available databases, or type the filename of
the FileMaker database file you’re using as a data source.
Note For database files hosted by FileMaker Server, the list of databases may be filtered
based on the File Display Filter setting. See FileMaker
Server Help for information. The
sample file FMServer_Sample cannot be used to test ODBC connections. To test ODBC
connections, upload your own database.
1 If you need special handling of non-English text, click Advanced Language.
To auto-detect language settings, select the Auto-detect language settings for
application option. To specify the language setting, clear the Auto-detect language
settings for application option and select the system setting you want to use.
For the Multi-byte text encoding option, select System or select UTF-8. For example,
some applications such as Microsoft Excel may expect text to be encoded using the System
encoding, but web applications may expect text to be encoded using UTF-8 encoding. If the
application expects a specific encoding but this option specifies a different encoding, then
the application may display some characters incorrectly. FileMaker supports UTF-8
multibyte characters consisting of up to three bytes.
1 Select the Describe text fields as long varchar option to correct issues with long field
values, such as using fields that do not have a maximum length specified in Microsoft Word
Mail Merge import, or field values in PHP applications that are longer than 255 characters. If
you do not use this option for field values longer than 255 characters, then your application
may retrieve an empty string (Windows) or only 255 characters (macOS).