Whitepapers
When it comes to container data, there's three types of FileMaker solutions.
For obvious reasons, the third kind is the one you want. If you have container data that never gets into FileMaker, you may eventually lose track of it (where's that file?). If you have container data that never comes out, your solution will become isolated, bloated, and/or slow.
Getting data into a container field is easy. The real trick is getting your container data back out of FileMaker Server. There's a growing universe of APIs, cloud object storage and other services that can consume and utilize your container data in a variety of very exciting ways. Sending images to an external AI service for processing. Uploading a voice recording for transcription into JSON. Inserting a PDF into an Amazon S3 bucket. The list of reasons to make your container data available outside FileMaker grows every day.
The best method to get your container data out of FileMaker server is through the FileMaker DATA API. Querying a record creates a temporary URL of the file in your container. As long as you understand the mechanics around that process, you'll find you can actually get data out of your server faster by using those URLs than by any other method.
It's so fast that I built a subscription API that abstracts the whole URL process for use with Amazon S3: it's called s3.fm.
Click here to get the free whitepaper.
Update: July 20th, 2021 — If you're using FileMaker Server 19.3.1 or later, get this one too: