FileMaker iOS SDK - Part 3

Building an iOS App from a FileMaker Database

Welcome to Part 3 of the FileMaker iOS App SDK series, in this article I will take you through creating the project directory that will house our app settings and files. In part 1 and 2 we highlighted some considerations that need to be made when developing our solution for iOS, setup our Apple Developer account, added an App ID, created a provisioning profile and setup Xcode ready for developing our App.

We will be building an iOS App from the WindowFurnishing solution we have built for McKenzie and Willis. You can read a case study on the McKenzie and Willis project here.

Signup for a FileMaker Developer Subscription

Before we can create a project directory we need to purchase a FileMaker Developer Subscription and download the iOS App SDK.

Create a Project Directory

The iOS App project directory contains the required files and iOS frameworks for our App. We’ll start by extracting the iOS App SDK to the desktop on our Mac. Once that's done we’ll open the terminal application located in /Applications/Utilities/ or by typing terminal into a Spotlight search. Using the terminal we will change our working directory to the iOS App SDK directory, the easiest way to do this is to type cd followed by a space then drag and drop the iOS App SDK folder in to the terminal window, pressing return / enter will execute the command.

Now that we are in the working directory for the iOS App SDK we can create our project directory by running the makeprojdir command with the required parameters:

./makeprojdir <NewAppDir> <appName> <bundleIdentifier>

NewAppDir - This is where we will store the files required for the iOS App
appName - This is the name we will give our iOS App
bundleIdentifier - This is the identifier we used in Part 2 Registering our App ID

The command we will run in terminal to create our WindowFurnishing project directory will look like this:

./makeprojdir /Users/james/Desktop/McWApp/ WindowFurnishing com.mckenzieandwillis.windowfurnishing

Once the command has completed an iOS App directory named McWApp will have been created for our Window Furnishing App. We'll take a quick look inside the project folder and examine its contents. The folder contains four items:

• app.entitlements
• iOSAppSDKResources
• WindowFurnishing
• WindowFurnishing.xcodeproj

Do not modify the app.entitlements or iOSAppSDKResources, these contain important files required for the iOS App.
The WindowFurnishing folder will be used to store our custom App files (along side other automatically generated files).
The WindowFurnishing.xcodeproj is the Xcode project file, we can double click this to open our project in Xcode.

Continue reading with the fourth and final part in the iOS SDK series.