Hi All,

I do hope you don’t mind me asking you this, but I am sure it’s a common problem for developers inheriting databases.

I have a project to do that requires substantial additions to an existing FM7 database. The database was written when FM7 first came out and the developer had not quite got the hang of the ‘new’ relationship graph.

Rather than creating relationships by creating new TO’s of each table as required and connecting these to the ‘base’ table where they were going to be used (for portals, calcs, scripts etc) they simply connected each ‘base’ table and added in new TO’s (‘Clients1’, ‘Client 2’…etc.), in a bit of an ad hoc fashion. The result being that everything is connected to everything else and trying to find TO’s that I need to use is a nightmare.

Before I go ahead with new development and additions I want to straighten this out. It’s a daunting task but one that I hope will make future development a lot easier and quicker.

I use a variant of the method that was described in an issue of Filemaker magazine, an article called ‘Taming the Relationship Graph’ if I remember correctly.

Each base table’s relationships are created by creating a new TO of the required table. No two base tables are ever directly connected. The relationships are named by putting the base table name, then the related TO name, e.g. ‘Clients_CONTACTS_clientID’. Where ‘Clients’ is the base table where I want to view the information, ‘CONTACTS’ is a TO of the contacts file, and ‘clientID’ is the match field.

This means that whenever I want to use a relationship the only ones that I see when I am in a layout, define fields etc. are the related tables with unrelated tables greyed out at the bottom of the drop-down.

Anyway, can you recommend a method and work order to change the existing TO’s so that I do not end up with loads of commented out calc fields and scripts? I guessI will have to manually edit the portals, scripts, calcs etc., but I need to do it so that I can see what I am going to replace them with!

Trust this makes sense and hope you can help.

Best regards

David