Having heard and read that Claris Studio provides web forms and can transfer collected data to FileMaker.
I'd like to learn what it can do FileMaker WebDirect cannot do. What is the functional delta between the two?
I have not been able to try it out yet. But from what I've read: You can use Claris Studio to publish forms on the web that anonymous users - that is, without logging in - can fill out. Or you can make data or dashboards accessible on the web.
Basically that is what WebDirect can do with anonymous users?
Claris Studio makes it much easier and faster to create forms and dashboards than FMP for Webdirect. Developers no longer have to do this, but authorized users should also be able to do it. At least that's how I understood it.
And I suppose these Claris Studio pages behave responsively like other modern websites.
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[Addendum]
I don't even see this in a negative way. In my eyes it's about a not so wrong simplification of activities in the sense of an advantage for our customers. I don't see it as "replacing the developer".
I hope they will bring that on European Servers soon. Now it only runs on servers in the US .
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This is also an in-house thing: You have the possibility to publish data for other inhouse departments in needed.
I'm exclusively looking for functional differences/similarities.
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At present Claris studio and FileMaker are almost equivalent. There are things that Studio does that are different. Expect to see those differences increase.
At present I think of Studio as FileMaker + Airtables.
The near equivalents are Claris Pro and FileMaker. Claris Studio is an additional element of the Claris platform that adds the functionality I described.
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Hey @Malcolm, are you sure you meant to say that? I perceive those two (asuming you meant your comment about how Studio compares to FileMaker Pro) to be very different at this time.
What I mean is that Claris Pro and FileMaker Pro are equivalent at this point.
Studio provides web forms builder UI and dashboards. Its data store is mongo, so it’s very scalable. Studio offers the ability to provide data input UI to the world : web forms. On the backend it provides dashboard to the team who is collecting the data. Lots of Interactive charts. The data is able to be integrated into Claris Pro files too.
WebDirect offers the ability to present an application to your users in the browser. Like FileMaker in the browser. It’s licensing model and it’s high resource use means it’s not highly scalable.
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As even developers have to pose themselves questions like "What can we do with it?", "What is the difference?" and "Why do we need it?" ...
Claris is king of making things complicated with their products and licences. Instead of focussing on their top-product for 30 years (Filemaker). A brand new product (Studio) for making anonymous web forms and dashboards? Hurray!
I really don't know if I would re-start with Filemaker these days. What evolution did they make the last 10 years?
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Over ten years, plenty. We should not be confused by the fact some familiar elements stay the same over time. Excel still has rows and columns, Word still has buttons to format your text as bold, italic and underline (Although Microsoft got some bad review for their implementation of the "Ribbon").
I forget when Claris moved the status area from the left hand-side of the screen to the top of the screen to mimic browsers and other apps users are familiar with, but with our 16x9 displays, I kind of wish they kept things on the left. Anyway, like with anything, some new features may be useful to you, some others may not, some may be more cosmetic.
I see studio as a "side-car" to FileMaker (or Claris Pro rather). It is still in its infancy and even if the wow factor may not be present at this time, there are people who can have use cases that are a good fit for it, and I do not exclude that over time, it may get more and more that will make it attractive for more use cases.
It's funny to see the kind of reflections we have today when a fair number of developers were not all that pleased, back when FileMaker 7 was introduced, for the new software felt too different from what was familiar (I recall some people asking for a list view of their solution's relationships).
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I know it's all personal but I have a long list of things to wish to make Filemaker more professional instead of creating a Claris-like "side-car".
• Full and FAST SQL support
• New layout elements like foldable portal rows, ...
• Find & replace in scripts
• ...
What I want to say: I'd prefer Filemaker to focus and becoming a better (and FASTER!) database development system before expanding to Claris-Studio-like things. It is such a fine product but but the pure database management system stopped evolving a bit (btw: the new transactions are promising)
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The advantage and problem with FileMaker is the Draco Database Engine: we were told in a presentation in Montréal that it has been extended up to a point where adding to or modifying takes longer and longer to achieve - understand much too long. It's up to a point where it's better to use a blank sheet of paper.
The actual implementation of Draco relies on exterior components Claris has no control over. Somewhere at the end of summer 2022 the developer of one of those components made a major release that broke FileMaker.
Full and Fast SQL Support: Draco is not a SQL engine, everything goes through a translation layer to do SQL. Claris Studio uses a NoSQL engine that is furiously fast, even through WAN.
Find and replace in scripts: the reason has been explained multiple times why it's not possible. Scripts are not saved as text.
Claris improves the products, but not where one would expect. To my best knowledge, Claris Studio is the ONLY solution that let's you create the UI graphically by dropping components and dragging them.
Claris Studio is made to offer speed where FileMaker is hard to improve, and keep the ease to develop FileMaker has provided for years.
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You can use Chris Dragons 2emPower (pro edition: Search&Replace)
https://www.dracoventions.com/products/2empowerFM/family/developer.php
The MBS Plugin lets one also do searches in scripts
So, there seems to be a way to get that functionality
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Our plugin function basically read what is shown on screen, which is not complete.
So if Claris would do a find feature in a script, they could find all the stuff, which MBS Plugin can't find.
And of course they could do replace. Find $x and replace with $y should be doable.
Yes, it is a lot of work for Claris and yes, there are edge cases where it may not work as expected.
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Thanks for this clear answer!