One of the web apps I work on leverages a Filemaker database. My co worker Brent the expert Filemaker dude, and I had a serious problem to tackle - how to get Rails and Filemaker talking to each other.

Now Filemaker has iffy SQL standard support and we didn’t necessarily want our web app to run live from the Filemaker database. We spent some time looking at making an ActiveRecord adapter for FM but really at the end of the day it was too much like hard work.

There are 3rd party solutions out there that can do this stuff for you, but if your needs dictate that they won’t work - our experience may help you. I’m going to write up the theory behind this which has been live in production for a good 6 months + and in the coming weeks will release some code acts_as_syncable or similar…

First off we wanted it occassionaly connected, one way synchronising. We had an installed instance of Filemaker Web Publishing engine so we could expose our data as xml views. We used a background rails (backgroundrb) process to query Filemaker every 5-10mins and ask for changed data, pull that data using REXML, and populate/update on the Rails side using ActiveRecord.

Here’s the mechanics…