I purchased BaseElements from Goya in mid December and it is a must have tool from my perspective as a FileMaker developer. 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.
BaseElements 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’m enjoying having this tool very much but I found it even more valuable after making a discovery. The solution is pretty open but where it is really wide-open is when you create new layouts. 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.
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 wanted all the custom field access. 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.
I happened to try creating a new layout and voilá all the related tables within the PrivilegeSets table were there for my choosing. End of problem. You can export data too. I don’t really need to export, but creating a simple custom report layout will give me what I need.
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 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.
3 replies on “Using BaseElements for FileMaker Pro 9 to get PrivilegeSet data”
Thanks for commenting your experience with BaseElements. I found MetadataMagic unvaluable for analyzing the FP5 files. Also for making transitions f to v7+ files. It is a rock and the info accurate and really fast, compared with Analyzer. I identified all problems of the files and used extra functions to evaluate the funcionality and need of fields, relationships, layouts et al.
My first tool was Analyzer. I have used it (up to v.3.6) and was satisfactory for prior FM 7 files. It had a few quirks and some imports toke forever but useful. Therefore I purchased Inspector. It has been unpleasant to use and I am not comfortable with. It seems to me difficult to distinguish the trivial (the noise) from the essential.
I want MMagic for FM7+. It seems New Millenium is not going to update the tool and as you can see in
http://tinyurl.com/2cajue
there is not release date, which seems to me that there is not going to be MMagic for FM7-9.
All your comments and in-depth analysis on this kind of tools are very appreciated.
I too really liked MetadataMagic and have used it to prep files that I am converting from FileMaker 6 and prior to FIleMaker 7+. It would be great if a MetadataMagic for FileMaker Pro 9 would emerge. New Millenium does great work.
I’ve also usedAnalyzer and then Inspector and its problem dots which I like. I just prefer BaseElements at the moment as its underpinnings feel more intuitive to work with.
We are lucky to have the wealth of tools available. Also, don’t forget FMdiff which is a very cool program for its almost instantaneous comparison of two filemaker files and attempt to identify whether or not files have any corruption.
Oh!! Great… Thanks for the detail…