WebSTAR lets you publish your databases to the Web, automatically! Just open your FileMaker Pro database or ODBC data source, and follow the instructions below to make your data web-accessible. You can show the world the items in your catalogs, accept survey entries, or make a private area where your employees can check inventory records.
WebSTAR Lasso Publisher is the WebSTAR Plug-In that allows you to pass information between a FileMaker Pro database or ODBC data source and web pages served by WebSTAR. For example, you can create an online guest book that visitors to your website may use by filling out a form. The information from that form can then be placed in a database by Lasso when the user clicks the Submit button. WebSTAR Lasso Publisher can also make it easy to browse that guest book by taking a search query on a web page and performing that search on the database, then returning the results in the form of another web page. For more powerful and flexible database access, you can use a third-party database integration CGI or Plug-In, such as Lasso Web Data Engine from Blue World Communications.
In addition to database connectivity, WebSTAR Lasso Publisher also provides a set of useful non-database related tags that allow you to perform tasks like automatically emailing the contents of a form. To see a list of these tags, see the LDML 3.5 Reference Database, which is in the Lasso Tools folder.
The specific examples in this chapter will refer only to FileMaker Pro databases.