06. Reactor Development Tutorial

The following provides everything you should know to create your own BlackBoxes (or modify others) in Reactor.

The first section provides an introduction to management of a BlackBox in Reactor.


The second section is a more advanced guide to the FR Toolbox functions, used to communicate with your FileMaker application.

  1. Debugging


This entire tutorial is around building several functions for a single BlackBox. If you would prefer to see the functions in action, you can download the fully-completed BlackBox here:

You can import this into the Reactor application by adding a new BlackBox, and choosing to import it.

However the best way to learn Reactor development is to progress through this tutorial step-by-step – but you’re more than welcome to use the completed BlackBox to access individual snippets of code or to help figure out any issues you might be having with your own BlackBoxes.

Section A: BlackBox Management



1. BlackBox Files

If you have not done so before, now would be the ideal time to go through the in-app tutorial for Reactor. You can do this from the Support screen in Reactor.

When you create or select a BlackBox to manage, you start off on the ‘source files’ tab.

This is what appears when clicking on one of the demo BlackBoxes, it comprises the main file for the BlackBox, and any supporting files it requires. If you start a new BlackBox, this list will start off empty. Go ahead and create a new BlackBox called TutorialBB.

By the time you get to the end of this tutorial, your TutorialBB will be chocker-full of functions that communicate with FileMaker via Reactor. The BlackBox is a portable file you can install on any computers you wish to invoke these functions.
You will be invited to start uploading files, or create an HTML template after creating your first function - see the following section.