Subtitles of the Movie

Welcome to the VTC tutorial FileMaker Pro and PHP Foundations. My name is Lance Halburg and I'll be your instructor. These tutorial lessons will train you on how to use the FileMaker Pro API for PHP so that you can integrate FileMaker Pro databases with the popular web scripting language PHP. PHP has become the scripting language of choice for large percentage of web developers, partly because of its open source nature and also because it's easy to learn and support. Using PHP is much like writing scripts in FileMaker Pro. And in that way it becomes the web tool for FileMaker Pro developers. The FileMaker Pro and PHP Foundation tutorials will introduce you to PHP from a FileMaker developer's perspective. And give you all the tools you need to immediately begin harnessing the power of FileMaker's new API for PHP to create dynamic websites. I want to start by giving you a visual example of how these two software technologies can be merged in a practical and promising way. I'm going to show you a FileMaker Pro database that is used to store class records and instructor records for an educational institution. Then we'll look at the website for this institution and discover how they use FileMaker's API for PHP to create beautiful and dynamic online content. The following solution is used by permission from the NECA IBEW electrical training center in Portland, Oregon. This is a FileMaker Pro database which track classes for the training center. There is a lot of content here, but I want to draw your attention to just a few items. In the setup area for a class we can specify all the metadata that a typical training course would contain, such as the class name, instructor and location. Over on the dates tab, we can specify multiple dates for the class, including the start date, end date, holidays and so forth. On the journeyman tab, we can enter specific information that relates to our journeyman students. I can specify the certificate name, a detailed description, whether or not the class is to be listed on the website and down below, I can specify the amount and type of credit our journeyman students will receive. On the evaluation questions tab, I can specify questions that can be used to create an evaluation form for the class. This is the Sieman's terminations and procedures class. Students who attend this class will receive the Sieman's certification. Finally, we set up the cost for the class, which can be determined by registration fees or materials fees. One more item to show you before we leave the database. We have an instructors' database with a web tab. Here we can enter in a small bio for each instructor. We can specify whether we want this instructor and their bio to appear on the website. We viewed a complete FileMaker Pro solution, which tracks information typical of an educational institution. The kind of information that would be great to display on the web to keep members and potential customers informed of class schedules and availability. This integration has been completed for the website at the training center using FileMaker's API for PHP. Let's open that site and see how it looks in its finished form. When this web page loaded, a PHP script ran which performed a couple of finds on the FileMaker Pro database. One of the finds found all the available classes and from this list of classes, PHP was used to sort through them and aggregate them in the pagelets that we see grouped on the left-hand side. Remember that each class offers a type and amount of credit. PHP has summarized that data here. Below it, again, all the classes available have been summarized by date. Further down we can see the classes summarized by location and then by certification. All this summarizing and grouping was done off of one query in the database, showing off just how sophisticated PHP can be when working with found sets from the FileMaker API for PHP. Remember our instructor database where we specified whether their bio would show on the web? The FileMaker API for PHP has also found that set of records as well and they've been outputted using this nice JavaScript accordion effect. The FileMaker API for PHP can be used to conditionally create many types of web code, including HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Let's look at one more interactive example of this PHP FileMaker Pro inclusion. I'm going to log in as an example journeyman who has taken the Siemen's certification class. Here's the user profile for this example person. The information here can be edited and saved. When the save changes button is clicked, all this data immediately goes back into FileMaker Pro and edits the record for this journeyman. If I click on the class history tab, I can see all the classes that this journeyman has attended. When I click on the evaluation button, here are all the evaluation questions that we set in the FileMaker Pro database are displayed. There's also a link on the class history page where I can download the certificate that shows that I've taken the class. Now, it's important to note here that the pdf file is not the result of a printed certificate that was scanned and uploaded to the web server. When a user clicks on the download link, PHP dynamically creates a pdf certificate using information gathered from the FileMaker Pro database. The pdf file is then compressed into a zip format and sent to the browser. There are other items available in this application, including a logout script, which securely closes the PHP session, not allowing anyone else to maliciously enter the previously opened PHP session. I've shown you a small example of what PHP and FileMaker integration looks like and just how versatile your solutions can be when you've learned how to harness the power of FileMaker's API for PHP. I'm very excited to give you the essentials you'll need to work with this technology.