[FX.php List] Off topic: Advice needed to bootstrap a v5.5 to v7conversion

[Andy Gaunt]

Dave -

To consolidate your tables from separate files into a single file with many
tables is as you have found not such a simple task, but there are tools that
can help to a degree.

FMRobot (www.nmci.com <http://www.nmci.com/> ) will allow you to take a
database design Report formatted as XML (using your developer copy of FM7)
and create the necessary tables in the single file.

Note however that this will just bring in the fields only. It will not
create the relationships or scripts from your existing solution. Because it
will not bring in the relationships any calculation fields or lookups that
reference a related field will be broken. Fortunately FMRobot will comment
these fields for you, enabling you to see the broken ones quickly. It will
also not bring in your scripts so again more manual labor.

To give you an example of timescale, I took a 15 file database in FMPro 6
and converted to 7. The process went something like.

1.	Convert all the files to FM7
2.	Open all the FM7 files in FileMaker Developer 7 and run the Database
Design Report to generate the XML document
3.	Using FMRobot, I created new tables from the separate files.
4.	Pulled out whiteboard to restructure the relationships. This is
where you can begin to harness the new relational structure of 7
5.	Went into define database and on each table, looked at the comments
to find the broken calculations and lookups and recreated the calculations
from the v6 file using new relationships
6.	Scripts - Well we were not using too many scripts at this point, but
you could now import your scripts into 7. Note however that you may not need
all the scripts you had separately as ANY table can call a script in the
file.
7.	Now, if you were going to do some PHP too, you would need to update
your PHP files to reflect the new version change of 7 and add in any new
code.

This took 12 hours to complete and get the databases and website working
using FileMaker Pro 7. Hope this helps.

Regards

Andy Gaunt      

T: 407.810.4722

 <mailto:andy at fmpug.com> andy at fmpug.com

 <http://www.fmpug.com/> http://www.fmpug.com

 

June 23rd 2005, 7pm Orlando FMPug

Register interest online at  <http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp>
http://www.pug-planet.com/rsvp.php

 

  _____  

From: fx.php_list-bounces at mail.iviking.org
[mailto:fx.php_list-bounces at mail.iviking.org] On Behalf Of Dave Strickler
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2005 7:56 AM
To: fx.php_list at mail.iviking.org
Subject: [FX.php List] Off topic: Advice needed to bootstrap a v5.5 to
v7conversion

 

I know this is off topic for the group, but there seems to be some good
minds here so....

 

I am seriously thinking of converting our FM v5.5 app (about 25 tables) into
a FM v7 app, and would like to take advantage of the 'one database, many
tables' nature of v7. However, I can't find how to import into a v5.5 file
into an existing v7 file, to do the consolidation of files/scripts.

 

I have found a few 3rd party tools that claim to do this, be even their
descriptions are not clear as to what they do and do not do.

 

Any advice on how to do this or a tool I should use?

 

I'm using FM 7 Developer, and am not afraid to write some code if needed ;-)

 

 

 

Dave Strickler
MailWise LLC
617 267-0044 x810 
www.mailwise.com

 















 

 

 

 
----------------------------
This message has been certified virus-free by MailWise Filter - The
real-time, intelligent, e-mail firewall used to scan inbound and outbound
messages for SPAM, Viruses and Content.  For more info visit:
http://www.mailwise.com 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.iviking.org/pipermail/fx.php_list/attachments/20050610/66e04e7d/attachment.html