Magento

It’s been about a year since I was last experimenting with Magento. I spent many hours/days trying to come up with alternative way to bypass the Magento frontend to manipulate the data directly. I had a fair amount of success using FileMaker Pro as a frontend to the MySQL database.

Importing Categories
Getting the categories to import from our company’s internal database was a stumbling block for me. I never got this part working but once I manually entered all of the categories into Magento I was able to manipulate them from FileMaker and change all aspects of them. I could do things like change how they were organized or change their content.

Importing Products
When I last worked on this I was still bulk importing our products into Magento using the Magento frontend. But once I got the raw data imported I would manipulate them and assign them to the desired categories directly from Filmmaker.

Manipulating Magento Products Directly Using FileMaker
This is where the real time savings came in and where I finally got control over my Magento database.  Once I bypassed the Magento front-end I could use FileMaker scripts to make global changes to all of my 500+ products. I could also build relationships between the Magento MySQL data and our company’s internal database. This made it easy to manipulate and organize my Magento data in seconds instead of minutes or hours. I could make global changes instantly such as assign the products to the desired categories and sub-categories.

Documentation From Varien Would Help
If Varien would supply adequate documentation I could easily write a FileMaker interface to do everything, from importing categories and products to pulling invoices into our company’s internal database. I had about 80% of this working when I gave up because of some unrelated pricing limitations with Magento’s shopping cart.

It’s going to take me a few days to get my head back into it. I have forgotten much of what I had learned a year ago but I am sure it will come back to me quickly...along with how much I loathed this Magento program.

Do you have FileMaker Experience?
I will share my FileMaker solution as soon as I get it working again. If anyone has FileMaker experience and wants to work on this with me please contact me to collaborate on the effort of eliminating the Magento frontend.

Wouldn’t mind working with you on this. I have not worked on the category and product side yet, but I am importing orders and customers into Filemaker. Down the road everything will work through our Filemaker database and be connected with Magento.

Hi-

I’m working with my Filemaker developer on such a project.

Is Magento lacking documentation to properly admin the database via Filemaker?

-Darren

We are also interested in a Filemaker Front End to Magento, specially for Product and also Orders and Customers.

At the moment I am also try to build a Filemaker solution, but it would be good if I could get some of your expertise based on your experiences.

Andreas Amacher

I am in a desperate situation.  I have done the same and had no success.  I have been working on my clients Magento site for almost 2 months now trying to get this filemaker pro database integration working.  But to no avail.  Can you please contact me?  I really would like to get some help.  I would pay you for your time.  Thanks   gwa.submit@gmail.com

"integration working” is a very broad goal. If you mean basic access to the mySQL tables within FM, that is very easy. (but changing data is for the most part done using magento api) Manipulating FM data with FM’s PHP API is also well documented. You can also get and post from FM using a paid extension from 360works or run shell or other scripts triggered by an FM script step.

I can help you with the basic hookups, but can’t help much with the magento logic.

I am new in the programming field, after reading some posts, i feel that here many members contributed some good information with the newbie members. FM concept is pretty good to me.

I am interested in this as well.  What is the latest?

Is there any solution for this topic. We need the same

We need the same. Is there a solution?

br

Also interested in this. Have a client who would like to run his store using Magento in four languages as a front end and Filemaker for the backend. Really would like to see if this is possible. Perhaps there are some extensions for this by now? Or has anybody written any documentation on this? I have not found a lot of information on the internet so far. This thread was one of the few. Another was at Filemaker: http://filemakertoday.com/com/showthread.php/28225-Filemaker-amp-Magento I am looking into that thread remarks, but would love some feedback here.

Given the EAV dataspray that has to occur in order to transfer data from relational or flat table data storage into multiple row self joins, don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen.

If you are used to a flat table, think along the lines of replacing multiple columns in that table with rows that hold the value and have an ID column that represents the column title and another couple ID columns to help the row key to yet another table. Now break that flat table up into about 60 tables just to store product data and categories and you have an idea of what you need to do to translate from Filemaker/Access to Magento data storage.

The place to start is to heavily use the Magento SOAP API after the manner of what ShipWorks does to manage orders. The major problem comes about when you try to write data back to Magento and find there’s no logic built into the API to do that for the particular item you want to manage.

If you decide to do direct SQL inserts outside of Magento’s collection logic, you risk database corruption as you have all those ID keys hanging over your head as an easily ripped diaphanous network that must be managed to hold everything together over the multiple tables they reference

The closest anyone has come to marrying external SQL to Magento’s database at this time is the MAGMI (Magento Mass Importer) project. You can use it as a source for ideas for your Filemaker integration.

Thanks for the input chiefair. Really appreciate it. Will look into the importer you mentioned. But perhaps we will have to go for two separate systems.

Edit:

Found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7751451/integrating-filemaker-database-with-magento as well and looking into this.

Also read at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7751451/integrating-filemaker-database-with-magento that Productive Computing has achieved a way to update Magento from Filemaker 11 and found a way to update Filemaker from Magento