I’m getting incredible productivity in FileMaker Pro 9 Advanced. The Advanced features help mainly in the debugging phase. The regular Pro 9 features help in development with the multiple script windows open while I test.
All the pieces are in place now to be very efficient as a developer.
I’m in the middle of a project converting a FileMaker 5.5 system to FileMaker 9. This is way fun. I’m taking multiple scripts and cranking out single script parameter and variable driven versions in a couple minutes. Maybe its the growing experience along with the fine-tuning FileMaker Inc. has done in 9.
A great experience. FMI has put it all together. I expect you’ll be hearing a lot about FileMaker 9 here and elsewhere.
3 replies on “Developer Productivity in FileMaker Pro 9 Awesome”
Many thanks for sharing your experience in your blog. I’ve learnt a lot from them.
I am also a FileMaker developer and currently working on converting a multi-file database system into a single-file system by using FileMaker 8.5. The existing system was originally developed by previous version of FileMaker. Although it has been updated to FileMaker 8.5, it still contains 88 file, and hence, is very inefficient.
In one of your previous blog, you said FMrobot can help a lot in this process. However, as you have pointed out that after FMrobot did its magic, I still need to (1) fix some of the calcs; (2) build or copy layouts into these files; and (3) import scripts. I found that these tasks were still quite time-consuming, especially for importing scripts. Therefore, I wonder, because 3 years have passed away since you published that blog, if above tasks can be fulfilled automatically by some other tools or higher version of FileMaker.
I was wondering if a table can be exported from one database to another. Not the data part I need the table itself (including its fields as they are shown from File->Define(or Manage on FM9)->Database Tables/Fields).
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Yes they can. With FIleMaker Pro 9 Advanced, you can copy and paste the table in the table view in Define Database. You can import the table in FileMaker Pro 9 by importing both the data if there is any and the structure by doing the FileMaker command: File/Import Records…File command and selecting the file to import. When you get to the match fields step choose your incoming file on the left and on the right towards the bottom choose New File (approximately the wording) towards the bottom of the list. You will need to copy and paste layouts and import scripts from the file — those don’t come over after an import.