Good morning.

I am running into a bit of an issue. I had an idea to connect a Visual Basic program to our existing FileMaker 7 databases. The idea here is that we currently use Visual Basic and an Access database to track production and print off labels. We would like to create a database of orders in FileMaker and have it so that the Visual Basic program can look up orders from the FileMaker database based off an order number. The coding of this in Access is fairly simple, but I wanted to know if anyone has done anything like this with FileMaker before. We currently use FileMaker 9, but that still uses the .fm7 format of databases.

The issue I forsee is that right now we are not running FileMaker on the three computers that use this Visual Basic program. I would imagine that there is either a universal connector out there, or a way to still get Visual Basic to talk to the databases. We do run FileMaker Server 9 on our server, so I figured that might make this a bit easier.

I have searched all over for help on this, can anyone here please help me out?

Thank you very much,
Justin Heins

You need Filemaker Server or Filemaker Advanced and create an ODBC connection to your served files.

Check this post if you want to test your connection.
Simple ODBC Tester in C# - FileMaker Forums - FileMaker Pro Help and Support Worldwide Community

Thanks for providing the program, however I now see a larger problem. The three computers that are not running FileMaker are operating in Windows 98, and I haven't had any luck finding an ODBC driver that would allow Visual Basic 6 to talk to the FileMaker databases. Does anyone know of any out there that would work, or am I going to have to find another way to do this?

Windows 98... that's a problem.

You might want to try a linux version with Wine so you could install filemaker on linux. I've already done that before.

BTW : FP7 format is still the standard for FM even with the latest version (10).