![]() ![]() They don’t like tearful phone calls anymore than the rest of us do. hates it when a database is damaged or lost because a hard drive goes bad or something else goes wrong and there’s no good, current backup. ![]() Remember how I was saying that a surprising number of people don’t test and backup as much as they should? Well, FileMaker Inc. You can sleep easier at night with FileMaker Pro 9. Then you are ready to experience a great, great piece of software. So, you’ve fluffed up your files with Save a Copy as and done some testing commensurate with the complexity of your database, system configuration and deployment (how many users do you have?). That goes for anyone upgrading to FileMaker Pro 9, whether from FileMaker 5 or FileMaker 8.5! The minimum you want to do is use the File/Save a Copy as… command on each file you have before you convert. Even though FileMaker keeps getting better and better at conversion of FileMaker 6 with each new release, you still need to test and prep the files before you convert. Maybe you still haven’t crossed that hurdle. That said, I would not hesitate to recommend FileMaker Pro 9 as the basis for the work of all of my customers who have upgraded beyond FileMaker Pro 6. I will say, though, that in these hectic times, corners are cut in the testing department more often than I would like. If you have a complex installation, you know it and know to (1) have an impeccably thorough and frequent backup system that matches that complexity and (2) do a lot of testing when you upgrade to new software to make sure everything works. You never squash all bugs because changes have unintended consequences that may only show up in extremely rare situations. ![]() To be clear, there will always be bugs and issues with any large, complex piece of software. I am happy to say that FileMaker Pro 9 and 9 Advanced have held up like champs. The first 30 days or so, I used FileMaker Pro 9 with some hesitancy to be sure no serious bugs would be found. ![]() It’s been over four months since FileMaker Pro 9 was released in July. I already purchased and wrote about FMdiff and recommend it to the skies for those who need a near instantaneous way of comparing two filemaker files. My next experiment will be to try out the compare file capability introduced in version 1.6 that lets you compare one version of a solution with another. I don’t really need to export, but creating a simple custom report layout will give me what I need. I happened to try creating a new layout and voilá all the related tables within the PrivilegeSets table were there for my choosing. What fields could they not see? That seemed to require getting down to a lower level of granularity but there was no tab for that. It wasn’t obvious how to do this because all I could see was a privilegeset record with some tabs, one of which showed each table in a portal with things like whether you could create, edit or delete records in that table given the current privilegeset. I was trying to get all the table and field access details of the 16 privilegesets in Studio Manager into records so I could print them out as documentation and use them as a reference without having to go into Manage Accounts & Privileges. The solution is pretty open but where it is really wide-open is when you create new layouts. I’m enjoying having this tool very much but I found it even more valuable after making a discovery. I need all the help I can get to document my solutions, check them for errors and find my way around my solution when I’m building new features or debugging something that’s not working the way I want.īaseElements takes the XML in the DDR and puts it into nice little FileMaker records where we can see exactly what is going on and get to the heart of the matter in a hurry. I purchased BaseElements from Goya in mid December and it is a must have tool from my perspective as a FileMaker developer. ![]()
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