Server-side scripts could also benefit from server-side plug-ins almost from the beginning… Well, officially. One of the few exceptions persisting, probably due to licensing issues, has been the Save as PDF script step, finally made available in FileMaker Server 16. At that time only a limited subset of script steps were compatible with server-side scripting, but some of the robot machines could finally be replaced by this feature.įollowing versions of FileMaker Server were slowly extending the set of script steps supported by server-side scripts, until now, when almost all meaningful script steps can be used server-side. Much better, safer, and correct in principle, solution was introduced with the release of FileMaker Server 9, the first version that allowed creation of server-side script schedules.

Robot machine is a stand-alone FileMaker Pro client constantly connected to the FileMaker Server and regularly checking whether there is a task ready to perform. In the history, this need led to implementing a solution well known as a “robot machine”. But it was the FileMaker Server 13 that finally made this idea easy to implement. The idea of being able to off-load time consuming tasks from FileMaker Pro to FileMaker Server is as old as the scripting abilities of FileMaker Pro, which were introduced with the FileMaker Pro 3 release.

Filemaker pro server 13