We continue to add to our free FileMaker plugin. This time we’ve been doing lots of little bits and we’ve got a couple of great new features we need to test before going final with our next update.
Some simple list functions
We’ve added :
BE_Values_FilterOut ( textToFilter ; filterValues )
BE_Values_Sort ( listOfValues )
BE_Values_Unique ( listOfValues )
FilterOut removes values from a list, so you can then get the ones that remain. And Sort and Unique should be fairly obvious.
OAuth
First of all is OAuth support. OAuth is complex, and we’ve tried to do this in a way that you can utilise the existing HTTP functions with the OAuth based authentication. To use this, there is a new function :
BE_OAuth_RequestAccessToken ( url ; consumer_key ; consumer_secret ; request_key ; request_secret )
Call it once with empty “request” values, to get the request key and secret. Then call this function again with the new values to get the access key and secret. Hopefully then the BE_GetURL functions will use the new authentication and not require a username and password. Call that function again with empty values to clear it all out.
There’s probably some work to do on this get it all sorted and some error reporting to be done, but if you’ve been wanting to access an OAuth based Web Service, this will be a godsend.
Curl Options
Also because all of our HTTP functionality that we’ve implemented uses the free curl library at the back end, we’ve been able to add a quick function to set all of the curl options :
BE_Curl_Set_Option ( option ; value )
Call it with an option name, and a value, or empty values to clear them out. This will be handy for some of those edge cases where you need specific details for accessing the server.
Progress Dialogs
And finally we’ve added progress dialogs for allowing a simple way to show progress in a process. This is in a few of the other full featured dialog plugins, but is something we’ve wanted for a while.
If you’re testing the new features and have any feedback or issues, please contact us with your results. And if you try them out and they work and you like them, we’d love to know that too, it’s helpful to know they’re working just as much as it is to know they don’t work.
Download
You can download the Mac, Windows 32 bit and Windows 64 bit versions today, it is version 2.1.0a3.