What’s the best way to integrate this into my existing FileMaker solution?

How you go about integrating the functionality from the fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) file is entirely up to you – as the file is completely unlocked you get to go behind the scenes to learn how to handle the authentication, uploading, downloading etc and then recreate that in your existing FileMaker solution. Based on feedback from customers there have been three main ways they have approached the integration:

• Linking – this involves using the fmEcommerce Link file as a ‘interface’ or front-end file to your existing FileMaker file. This is a relatively quick way to get up and running – you relink the table occurrences to reference the matching tables in your existing FileMaker file and then update the layouts and add any new fields (such as the ‘WooCommerce ID’ fields and the POST data calculation fields). You also need to update any field references in scripts and create any new value lists.
• Use the fmEcommerce Link file as a Controller File – this involves downloading data to the fmEcommerce Link file from WooCommerce (e.g. new Orders each day) and then pushing that data from the fmEcommerce Link file to your existing FileMaker file. This is also a relatively quick way to get up and running – you simply write some additional scripts in the fmEcommerce Link file to push to push Customers, Orders, Order Items etc across to your file. To prevent duplicate Customers from being created you would create a ‘WooCommerce Customer ID’ field to store the WooCommerce Customer ID value in your FileMaker solution, otherwise everything else happens in the fmEcommerce Link file. You could then do an download once a day of all Orders received in WooCommerce and push them to your primary FileMaker solution.
• Embedding – this is the most complex and time consuming type of integration as it involves recreating the required functionality from the fmEcommerce Link file in your existing FileMaker solution. Our integration guide covers the high level steps that you need to take and the order in which to complete them. Most of the code can be copied and pasted, however you will need to manually create some relationships, table occurrences and valuelists. You can typically be up and running with authentication and downloading a Customer/Order in around 4 – 8 hours depending on the complexity of your existing FileMaker solution.

If you do decide to use the fmEcommerce Link file you will have to create and manage any required FileMaker Accounts and Privilege Sets.