How to dial your iPhone from FileMaker

Like many people these days, I cancelled my antiquated land-line a while back and have been using my mobile phone as my primary phone ever since.

A very useful feature that I have built into our customer database is the ability to dial customer phone numbers directly from within FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Go. And, it’s relatively simple to do.

Not only does it save time not having to dial the numbers yourself, more importantly it also eliminates dialling wrong numbers.

This tutorial will show you how you can dial your iPhone from both FileMaker Pro on your computer and FileMaker Go on your iPhone.

If you stick around, I’ve got some bonus content to show you at the end of this post – more specifically, how to send SMS messages from FileMaker Go, and how to call Skype using FileMaker.

 

Dialling numbers from FileMaker Pro

Now if you’re on a Windows machine or own a phone that’s not an iPhone, then shame on you – no, only kidding, but in order for this to work you need both a Mac and an iPhone.

To make phone calls from FileMaker, you first need to be able to make phone calls from your Mac. To make phone calls from your Mac, you need iOS 8 or later, OS X Yosemite or later, and both your Mac and iPhone need to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

We’ll run through the basics here, but for more detailed instructions check out:

OS X Yosemite: Use your Mac to make and receive phone calls

OS X El Capitan: Use your Mac to make and receive phone calls

Step 1 – Enable iPhone to allow calls from your Mac

First you need to enable your iPhone to allow calls on other devices.

iOS 9 or later: Go to Settings -> Phone, then turn on ‘Calls on Other Devices’.

iOS 8: Go to Settings -> FaceTime, then turn on ‘iPhone Cellular Calls’.

Step 2 – Enable Mac to allow calls to your iPhone

Next, you will need to enable your Mac to make calls via your iPhone. Open FaceTime and go to Preferences, then enable the ‘Calls From iPhone’ option.

Step 3 – Test that you can make iPhone calls via your Mac

Now we need to test that you can actually make a call from your Mac via your iPhone. Within FaceTime on your Mac, enter a phone number in the search field, then click the phone icon next to the number.

You should now be able to make a phone call from your Mac – you’ll see a notification show up asking you to Call or Cancel.

Step 4 – Script FileMaker to make phone calls

Now that your Mac can make phone calls via your iPhone, it’s time to script FileMaker to dial those numbers for us.

To instruct your Mac to make phone calls, we use the tel:// protocol.

You can simply type tel://1234 into your web browser (or click on the link) and your Mac will make a phone call for you.

The tel:// protocol is just another url protocol such as ftp://, http://, https://, file:// or fmp:// – except it instructs your computer to open the FaceTime app and dial the number passed to it – i.e. in this case 1234.

You can simply replace 1234 with whatever phone number you are calling, and FaceTime will make the call – for example tel://5678

Within FileMaker, we use the script step ‘Open URL’ to make the call, and pass the tel:// protocol and number as its option.

So within FileMaker, your script will look something like this:

Open URL [ With dialog: Off; "tel://1234" ]

Now if you run your script, FileMaker will dial the number for you.

However, this is not very useful as the phone number is hardcoded into the script. So instead of passing 1234, you will want to pass either a variable or a field containing the phone number to be dialled.

You could do something like this:

Open URL [ With dialog: Off; "tel://" & Table::PhoneNumber ]

or

Open URL [ With dialog: Off; "tel://" & $PhoneNumber ]

However, I prefer to pass the phone number as a script parameter and clean it up before dialling. This way, I have only one script to maintain and I can be sure that the phone number is clean of spaces, carriage returns, text and punctuation.

So my final script looks like this:

If  [ not IsEmpty( Get(ScriptParameter) ) ]
	Set Variable [ $url ; "tel://" & Filter ( Get(ScriptParameter) ; "0123456789") ]
	Open URL [ With dialog: Off; $url ]
End If

Simple stuff really!

Then all you need to do is create a button for your new script and pass a phone field as it’s script parameter and you’re in business.

When you click on your new button in FileMaker, the FaceTime app will launch and show a notification asking you to Call or Cancel. Therefore you will need to hit the Call button before the call is made.

FaceTime will now place the call for you via your iPhone and you may use your computer as a speaker phone.

However, I prefer to talk directly on my iPhone as it’s much clearer than talking via the Mac – and customers can hear me clearer too.

So to take the call on your iPhone, all you need to do is open your phone and click the green title bar and you’re done.

Yes, there are a few manual steps and clicks along the way, but it’s far simpler than dialling the number manually :)

Dialling numbers from FileMaker Go

Dialling phone numbers from within FileMaker Go is even easier as there’s no setup required at all. All you need to do is create the exact same script from Step 4 above and you’re done.

Nothing more to do.

Bonus 1: Sending SMS from FileMaker Go

In place of the tel:// protocol, you can use the sms:// protocol to send an SMS message. When clicking on your script, the Messages app will launch ready for you to type your SMS message.

Your script will look something like this:

If  [ not IsEmpty( Get(ScriptParameter) ) ]
	Set Variable [ $url ; "sms://" & Filter ( Get(ScriptParameter) ; "0123456789") ]
	Open URL [ With dialog: Off; $url ]
End If

Bonus 2: Dialling Skype from FileMaker

You may not be surprised that calling Skype from FileMaker is just as easy. All you have to do is use the callto:// protocol as follows:

If  [ not IsEmpty( Get(ScriptParameter) ) ]
	Set Variable [ $url ; "callto://" & Get(ScriptParameter) ]
	Open URL [ With dialog: Off; $url ]
End If

You may have noticed above that I’m not using the Filter() function for Skype calls. This is because Skype can call both phone numbers and Skype handles which are text. So we don’t want to filter out the text in this case. However if you’re only using it to make Skype-to-phone calls and not Skype-to-skype calls then you can use the Filter() function.

Download

You can download a sample file for you to play with here: Sample Code

Cheers!