<-- This example FileMaker order form uses calculations and functions to help authorized salespeople securely connect to and correctly process sales orders, using PHP scripts to interact with 3 SQL databases and 5 REST APIs in real-time.
In 2024, Adobe Acrobat, Claris FileMaker, Microsoft Excel, and Google Sheets can all be extended with PHP to enable securable dynamic bi-directional data interactions between users, SQL databases, REST APIs, or cloud services.
Forms that can calculate can also communicate, using native functions to validate, format, and send user-supplied parameters to PHP scripts that interpret the parameters, execute queries based on the parameters, filter the query responses, and return the results to specified form fields in real-time.
Each type of form provides different advantages depending on use case.
Any type of form can interact with any number of databases or APIs in any combination or event sequence, dynamically calculating, querying, parsing, merging, recalculating, and updating as users enter data in to form fields.
Completed form results can be packaged into virtually any required format and sent to virtually any specified location for additional processing. Nice!
Acrobat PDF forms provide extraordinarily adaptable programmable interfaces that can be used as freely deployable data calculation and interaction runtimes. Acrobat forms can be enhanced with JavaScript to add interactivity, making it possible to dynamically calculate, validate, and format data prior to sending it to PHP scripts that interact with SQL databases and REST APIs and insert filtered results back into form fields.
FileMaker database documents can calculate and execute queries that use PHP, PDO, cURL, and ODBC to interact with SQL databases, REST APIs, and cloud services. FileMaker's form tools provide extremely advanced calculation, scripting, and data processing control, excellent for building programmable interfaces that can be shared securely via FileMaker Server, as FileMaker documents, WebDirect forms, or FileMaker Data API.
Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheet documents can also use calculations and native functions to execute PHP scripts that interact with SQL databases and REST APIs. PHP scripts can filter and format scalar or aggregate query responses back to active cells in a variety of formats, including Excel dynamic arrays generated from XML-formatted results and Sheets dynamic arrays generated from HTML-formatted results.