WebDirect and the Back button
WebDirect was introduced as component of FileMaker Server 13 and has evolved regularly since then.
It makes your FileMaker custom applications available in the browser and available through the Internet, Claris making sure that the user experience is as close as possible from FileMaker Pro’s.
This has proven very useful in corporate companies where installing a software like FileMaker Pro on desktop computers isn’t trivial.
Web Direct is a good option if you need to expose your app to external users or to build a customer portal for instance.
WebDirect requires FileMaker Server
The “back button” issue
An often heard complaint though is that users are disconnected when they click the Back button of their browser. This button is confusing because it’s very similar and at the same top left corner than FileMaker Pro record navigation widget.
Our work-around
Here is our solution, freely downloadable and usable. It’s a single HTML file.
This HTML file disables the back button if a user connects to a custom app using the file URL.
Using the back button will result in a message telling the user he can’t use that button.
To install, simply download the file and place it in this directory of your FileMaker Server machine
- On Windows : FileMaker Server\HTTPServer\conf\
- On the mac : FileMaker Server/HTTPServer/htdocs/
Next edit the HTML with a simple text editor and modify the “solution” variable to indicate your FileMaker file name.
Usually, a user uses this kind of URL to connect to his custom app:
- https://<server>/fmi/webd/<filename>
With this solution he should rather use:
- https://<server>/<htmlfilename>.html
In our example this would be: https://1mt_server/1mt_Tasks.html
NB : If you’re using this solution with a http connection instead of https, don’t forget to edit the uri, variable in the HTML file (change https into http).
Download the file here: 
WebDirect_Wrapper.zip
Do not hesitate to share this blog post!
It’s Wonderful!!!
Gorgeous!!!
Thank You Fabrice…
It’s also simple customize the alert dialog with the proper localization…
The question is: Why Filemaker didn’t to it before?
Ciao Davide,
I take all compliments but this is a Romain Dunand and Ceydrick Valentini finding 🙂
Can you think of any potential problems caused by wrapping WebDirect in an iframe. E.g. perhaps if your app has a webviewer that uses iframes etc.?
Hello,
thank your for your question,
You’re correct, when the web viewer is set as interactive, the browser back button interacts directly with the web viewer! Under this condition, if your web viewer has a navigation history and you change layout, the wrapper will no longer have any effect on the back button. But in all other cases the wrapper works perfectly.
So to sum up, here are the steps to reproduce the issue:
– load a layout with an interactive web viewer
– load another page in the web viewer by following a hyperlink
– change layout
– click the back button
–> disconnection
GREAT!
Thank you so much for sharing!
I get Database not available 🙁
Hi,
Is your database available with legacy webdirect url ?
Also, does your filename includes special chars (accents, spaces, hashtag, slash…) ?
If so, please consider encode the filename at line 13, ie :
let solution = encodeURIComponent('my file with special chars &$/')Hi thanks for answering.
No it doesn’t have any special characters, the only thing no requires login my application. I tried to make the change you suggested, but nothing, always the same error 🙁 do you have any other ideas?
Fantastic simple solution. A life saver and from an HTML noob like me, thankfully easy to integrate
If I have two solutions, how do I specify more than one solution in the file, or what do I do?
Just add another html file for your other solutions, you can have as many wrapper as you want : ie solution_A.html, solution_B.html..
Thanks for sharing the knowledge!
I also want to warn user if he/she reloads the browser page / hit the reload button.
Kindly share the solution if possible!
Thanks in advance!
It’s great!
Just a single warning: It doesn’t work if the file is hidden (the file need to be shown on the host to work).
.g.
Hi Giulio
Thanks for your feedback.
We couldn’t reproduce the issue you described. The “hidden” option seems to have no side effect over this method (We tried both the Web Direct and the file sharing “hide” options).
Which version of FileMaker server are you using ?
Bonjour, Romain.
FMS 19.3
Windows Server 2019
SSL on (GoDaddy)
IN my experience with file sharing option “hidden” selected, the result is a warning “Database not available” [the translation could be inaccurate, the server is in italian and right now I’ve not the time to test on a english server), while with the file shown oh the host the procedure works flawlessly.
🙂
Yuo can add the homeurl option in the html file if you do not want to open the default webdirect page after logging out. Only limitation I see is that it stills hows the original url in the address bar.
im also getting an error: The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the “>referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of “>that page about the error. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.
There are no special characters in the name.
Is your server a Mac/Linux or Windows ?
If your are on mac/linux and have a SSL Cert install, the html file should be placed in the httpsRoot subfolder of the htdocs folder to be available
Thank you that fixed it. But how do I get the message to appear in English?
Hi Ceydrick,
what if we want to lock the mobile screen rotation in webdirect?
Always vertical for iPhone and orizzontal for iPad (I use two different layout).
We could inject some javascript in the html page?
Thank you!
It should be possible using CSS media queries or custom JS code to rotate the iframe depending on screen orientation as described here : https://stackoverflow.com/a/14360699/5242696
You can add anything you want in the html page to fit your needs
I noticed that this seems to interfere with the ability to access a file using a browser on iOS device. Is there a work around for this?
Do you mean a FileMaker file over webdirect or some “containers” ?
We didn’t notice any issue with this technic on iOS
Hi, i am struggeling around by the same issue. I would be very happy if i could have this demofile. Unfortunately the downloadable file is emtpy when i open it with textedit. what am i doing wrong? Thank you for advide
Hi!
TextEdit tries to render html files, and indeed there isn’t much to display here.
Try a different text editor, or change the file extension to .txt
I am on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, runing FMS Server Version 19.6.3.302.
File is located on the path:
C:\Program Files\FileMaker\FileMaker Server\HTTPServer\conf
No other files have been removed from that folder.
When I deploy by instructions above, I always get the Chrome result: “404 – File or directory not found.”.
My filename is formatted in the html file as “AAA__ClientStuff.html”
Any suggesitons?
Hi Jonn, Did you change anything in IIS config ?
If your file is located at C:\Program Files\FileMaker\FileMaker Server\HTTPServer\conf\AAA__ClientStuff.html
Then it should be available at https://your.server.dns/AAA__ClientStuff.html
Muy buena solución.
me funciono perfectamente.
existirá la posibilidad de impedir que el usuario cierre el navegador web.
Gracias,
No, I don’t think that is possible and if it was, it would probably not be a good idea.
The user who would really want to quit would just have force quit, and that would be a terrible, very intrusive user experience.
Thank you for this very helpful file. In parallel to this I have been testing Claris’ new jwpc_prefs.xml setting in v21 which allow you to suppresses pull to refresh. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that this does not work if I use your custom HTML page. Before I go down too many rabbit holes is this something you have looked at at all? I would like to suppress the back button AND the pull to refresh. ChatGPT is telling me it’s a problem with using an iframe. I’ve tried a few of its suggested modifications without success so far. Thank you!
Hi,
We haven’t tested over this new feature.
The pull-to refresh feature is something different than the refresh or go back buttons and it’s not very clear how Claris implemented it.
From what we know, the pull to refresh is disabled buy using “overscroll-behavior-y: contain” on the body, but the behavior may vary between Safari and Chrome.
Why not using the legacy webd page on iOS ? You can detect the device when the user load the page and chose to redirect it to the webdirect URL instead of loading it in an iframe if the user is on a mobile.
Regards
Thanks a lot for sharing!. This approach has been working for years when deploying to a single machine. Has anyone tried this with a master-worker deployment? It seems the redirect to the worker machine is not working.