Our developers review every major Claris release with one question in mind: What will make a meaningful difference in day-to-day FileMaker development? In this DevCast, we dig into FileMaker 2026. From new command-line tools to several welcome fixes, our developers found plenty worth exploring.
Key observations
- FileMaker Server 2026 lets you install just the command-line tools, without the full server package, opening the door to more experimentation with AI-assisted workflows.
- The new “Build File” function shows early promise for regenerating a clean file from a Save As XML export.
- Layout objects’ viewing and editing can now be easily controlled on the layout, offering a path to simplifying layouts, which is especially helpful for Web Direct.
- The new persistent data cache can store preferences, static HTML, and stable value lists without a helper table.
- Export Field Contents finally works on the server, closing a long-standing workaround.
- Custom dialogs can now be sized and positioned more reliably.
- Custom field names using a JSON structure allow for more user-friendly data export, sorting, and AI integration.
- New native PDF commands should reduce reliance on plugins.
- Remote backup and standby server options give smaller clients an easier path to disaster recovery.
Core mechanics
The persistent data cache got the most airtime, and for good reason. J. Warner walked through how it works: each named “bucket” holds a set of ID/value pairs, where both the bucket name and the IDs inside it can be plain text rather than a UUID. Scripts can set, update, or delete individual values via a script step, and deleting every ID in a bucket causes the bucket itself to disappear. Because the data lives in the client rather than the server, it persists across deployments, even, in many cases, without upgrading the server itself, as long as the FileMaker Pro clients are running 2026.
That persistence is what makes it useful for things developers have historically solved with a preferences table or a hosted helper file: static company information, cached HTML or JSON that a calculated field can pull from, or value lists that rarely change. The main trade-off is speed, as reading from the cache is a bit slower than reading from a table. For data that isn’t changing constantly, that cost is negligible.
Automating development
On the automation side, the new command line tools, Build File and Patch, let an AI model make targeted edits to a solution and potentially build a FileMaker solution directly using XML. These tools currently require the FileMaker app to be stored locally and closed before initiating the CLI commands, but it points toward tighter AI-to-FileMaker integration down the road.
Moving forward
The latest update of FileMaker is chock-full of features developers are eager to use. From infrastructure to layout tools, Claris is declaring that FileMaker is ready for the future. And with tighter AI integration on the very near horizon, AI-assisted development will continue to mature. For teams managing inherited, long-lived solutions, these changes are exactly the kind of groundwork worth keeping an eye on.
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This piece represents a collaboration between the human authors and AI technologies, which assisted in both drafting and refinement. The authors maintain full responsibility for the final content.