At SeedCode, we schedule most of our screen-shares with Zoom, so as part of streamlining our workflow we wanted to schedule these Zoom meetings directly from our calendar. Button actions in DayBack Calendar let you add your own buttons to events in the calendar. These buttons extend the calendar’s capabilities they’re great for connecting your calendar with third-party applications like Zoom.
Overview
We created a middleware service that runs the majority of the logic and sends requests to the Zoom API. Using middleware keeps the custom actions in DayBack much more straightforward than they’d be if all the required JavaScript were in these button actions. While this service could be run on just about any server, we decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to take advantage of Zeit. Zeit lets you spin up small instances of server-side code, similar to containers, without having to deploy and configure an entire server to run it on. Working with Zeit has been a great experience and is looking like it could be a pattern for future FileMaker API integrations.
I write a bit more about the technical side of this middleware (called DayBack Meetings Service) and Zeit further down in this post. You’ll also find downloads and a FileMaker example file that contains all the code you’ll need to add this to your own copy of DayBack Calendar.
Schedule Zoom Meetings from FileMaker
We’ve created buttons to schedule, start, and delete meetings. These actions also listen to DayBack events and reschedule Zoom meetings when you drag a meeting to a new time; they’ll also warn you if your new meeting time conflicts with another Zoom meeting.
Here’s a video of it in action: https://vimeo.com/314570405
3 Comments
Wow, didn’t know it had to be more complicated than simply copy & paste into a schedule.
The demo should be, here’s the api, plug here & it works…instead it this long arduous sounding process
in which I want to run from…
Creating revenue vs spending my time in a calendar…should be effortless, too many connectors
> Creating revenue vs spending my time in a calendar
Man, I hear you.
Once the code is in place, scheduling Zooms in the calendar effortless. And pasting that code into your copy of DayBack is just that: simply pasting. The complicated stuff in blog post is really for developers who might want to use this approach to connect FileMaker to other services.
KC hosted a code party on this technique on Feb 22nd. If you weren’t able to attend, you can find the slides here: http://bit.ly/2IGpaU8 They tried to record this but only got the video, no sound =(