There was no obvious way but a few ways actually existed. This was sufficient to replace the robot machine for long labor intensive tasks but could not be utilized to speed up short (under 1 minute) tasks, whose primary reason for slowness was the need to transfer a lot of data between the server and the client. So to have a task processed by a server-side script you could have had to wait up to a minute.

There was no obvious way to run a server-side script on demand, and schedules could not be set up for shorter period than one minute. One of the main drawbacks of server-side scripts has been that they had to be scheduled. FileMaker Server 12 also finally supported multithreading, enabling you to run a labor intensive server-side script without significantly affecting performance of connected clients. But realistically, it was not very easy and safe to use them until the release of FileMaker Server 12, when the server-side scripting engine was completely separated from the database engine to make sure that even a disaster such as plug-in crash does not affect the main database hosting functionality of FileMaker Server. 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 12