Developer’s Guide

1-8 FileMaker Pro Developer’s Guide
How the FileMaker Web Companion and Java classes interact
The FileMaker Web Companion can serve information from
FileMaker Pro databases to Java applets. Applet programmers take
advantage of this by utilizing the Java Class Library in FileMaker Pro
4.0. The library is a set of Java classes FileMaker Pro supports that are
compiled with the programmer's Java applet. These classes process
FileMaker Web Companion requests, send them to the computer where
FileMaker Pro 4.0 is publishing a database, and pass the results back to
the applet.
Java classes communicate with the FileMaker Web Companion using
standard HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). The classes formulate a
request string based on the parameters the applet programmer selects.
Then the classes send the request to the FileMaker Web Companion.
The response is generated and sent back, but instead of returning HTML,
a proprietary format is sent back and processed by the FMProResponse
class. The applet then chooses how to display the data.
About Java classes for FileMaker Pro
There are three main Java classes you can use to communicate with the
FileMaker Web Companion:
1 FMProRequest
1 FMProProxy
1 FMProResponse
FMProRequest specifies the action the FileMaker Web Companion will
take. You specify the name of the database, layout, and fields here.
Use the FMProProxy class when a request is ready to be processed. The
FMProProxy class takes an FMProRequest object, sends the request
data to the computer where FileMaker Pro is publishing databases, and
receives the response from the server. The FMProProxy object then
converts the response data into an FMProResponse object.
Then use the FMProResponse class to retrieve information from the
result object. The information you have access to includes:
1 a result code indicating if the request was successfully processed
1 the number of records returned
1 the total number of records in the database