Web viewers extend the capabilities of FileMaker by letting your database interact with the web. Recently we added a simple web viewer to E-Com, our special education software in FileMaker, that displays a web page with recent news and events. We wanted the users to be able to click on a link within the web viewer and see the linked page in a window in their web browser outside of FileMaker. It sounds simple, but turned out to be a ‘gotcha’ because FileMaker’s default behavior is that all interaction with the web page happens within the web viewer in FileMaker. There is no preference to open links in a new windows.

The simple fix to this issue is to use a bit of HTML, using the ‘target=”_blank”’ syntax to allow the link to open up in a new window.

In the demo download below, we have a web viewer object set up that will perform a search for the given product in different search engines.

The web viewer is using the  ‘target=“_blank”’syntax so that clicking on each link will open up a new browser window, leaving the web viewer object intact.