MSPJ

Hi- I have a solution with a scripted import to bring in data when the solution is upgraded. This has worked fine in the past. I noticed that when I was testing this today, it asked for an account to login before allowing import. Did FMP 18 add a requirement for account authentication that was not present in FMP17? Thanks.

I'm having something odd happening. I'm running FMS18 on a server on my LAN. When I run admin console on that machine, everything is as it should be. SSL certificate is installed, valid license, expected databases are open. When I access via another computer on the LAN, using IP address:16000/admin-console, I am able to login and it shows the server is running BUT no databases are there, license shows as expired and there is no installed SSL certificate. In the past, I've had issues where firewall software prevented accessing the console over my LAN - but I've never had a situation where I could log into the console from another machine, but server reported all this incorrect information. I can remote desktop into the server machine from the other computer, and run the console locally (port 16001) - all is good. But putting the same IP address into a browser on that other computer, I get this weird result. This started happening quite recently, and no doubt there have been windows updates since then. I'm just not sure where to look. Thanks for any suggestions.

This topic has been quiet for nearly 5 years and someone recently messaged me wondering where I'd gotten to with this issue. Thought I'd give a quick update for anyone who is interested. I'm currently on FMP 18, and the runtime is still there, but my understanding is it will be gone for real in 19. So the clock has started and I figure I have 2 or 3 years if not longer before 18 won't run on Windows. I have not had the time to move towards an alternative platform. Maybe I'll get 4 or 5 years out of 18. In the time since, I've developed a hosted small business product related to my family version. However, a hosted model is still completely out of the question for the family version. I continue to work on the family version for essentially zero profit because it is needed. My kids had special needs growing up and the need to manage all that paperwork is what led to my developing the product. I am committed to maintaining it because my customers tell me it is life saving for them. And they have some very sobering stories. (And now of course there is Covid19). Reading back over this thread, I still feel that the comments about this end user business model are not appropriate (I'm not talking about Claris's model - I'm talking about people like me). Even if a business like this is difficult to sustain, that would be my problem - it shouldn't bear on this discussion. Suggesting that people like me shouldn't complain because we had time to prepare is totally off the topic - this isn't a small business forum - it's a filemaker forum. I'm not complaining about running my business - I'm complaining about a product I've used for over a decade which has removed a significant functionality and offered no alternative. And now that I have a business version, it is still valuable for me to keep the individual version on this platform because of the shared code base and to enable parallel development. Five years later and Claris has offered no alternative path for runtime users. They have not communicated anything about their decision or the possible impact nor offered any kind of assistance with the transition. What continues to elude me is why they wouldn't simply offer a reduced fee runtime license. I have sold my solution to well over a thousand customers. FMI got nothing from that, so I get why that's a problem to them. But if they offered a runtime license of $50, that would be $50,000. That's 100 times the current cost of an individual license. I could sell my customers on a fee of around $50 - but very few of them could afford $540 for a full license. (And the ones who could, are not the ones desperately in need of this kind of help managing their medical paperwork). If a runtime is identical to a regular install with the only limitation being that only one solution can be opened, I don't see why it would cost Claris significantly to maintain it. Instead of maintaining the infrastructure in the standalone product to generate runtimes - why not simply sell the product with an activation process that only allows one database to be opened? They could then remove all the code from FMP (which they are about to do) and manage it as a particular license type. I've tried to figure out a way of bringing this to Claris, but I'm not sure who to approach with this. Any suggestions? Michael PS - To offer another perspective, I used to use Crashplan to backup my home computers. It was probably too inexpensive for what they offered, and at one point, they abruptly decided to close the individual offering, and not provide a way for people to easily save their archives. If you had 10 years of backups on their servers, they were simply going to be deleted. They tried to get people to go to a business plan which was much more expensive. At the time, I decided to abandon their company and not even consider their business offering. This was not primarily because of the cost but because the way they handled the change of their business model made me lose trust in them as a company. Had they offered a way for people to download their archives and continue to use their desktop software locally, it would have shown that they valued their customers, and I would have been more likely to continue with them. Similarly, I don't blame Claris for making a decision to focus their efforts wherever they see the most benefit. What I am bothered by is the decision to offer no help to a customer base of developers, some of whom were dependent on this feature. Can they afford to lose those customers with no damage to their revenue? I don't doubt it. But is it a good idea to show customers that you don't include the impact on them in your business plan? All companies put new development work where it will benefit them the most. But that's not the same as removing legacy features. Removing things is not the same as not adding new ones. I have seen no communication whatever from Claris on this topic other than the notification 5 years ago that it was being deprecated.

Yes unfortunately, the documentation for this product is inconsistent and not fully updated. There are the two sources you mentioned as well as the instructions that come with the package itself. They are different, and I'm not sure any of them are fully updated. For instance, my understanding is that ever since they started using FMI's migration tool, that the limitations on deleting fields had changed - but I don't think they ever updated the documentation on exactly what changes were permissible.

Hi, Could you guys clarify migration of user accounts, privilege sets, value lists, custom functions, custom menus, etc? Which come from dev and which from prod? My assumption is that everything but user accounts (and maybe value lists?) come from dev. Hopefully user accounts are maintained from prod. I know this wasn't true in older versions, but i believe it changed when you started using the migration assistant. Could you confirm?

This is obviously a very old thread. I love Evernote, but I've never felt security was good enough for business information. If love to use it for more but i mostly use it as a place to save stuff i find on the web .

Fitch - happy to give something small back, I've gained so much from these forums. Also I've been jealous of all the developer tools available for conventional languages, so I'm always on the lookout for these kinds of things. If FMI would offer either a true ide for scripts, calcs, etc or an easier way to interface, or even go back and forth to pure text, we could use merge and branch tools. I'll do another post on what I've come up with in that arena. Olger - I remember trying draw.io, as well as a few other web-based apps. Don't remember now why i rejected it. Is there a subscription cost? I still prefer desktop software when it's a good option.

I thought it might be helpful to offer a series of posts on tools I've found helpful (or, not helpful, in some cases). Some of these will be of use primarily for newer developers, but perhaps others will be of more general interest. This first post will focus on tools for documenting the development process and associated decisions. As I've learned filemaker and developed my solutions, I've found myself looking for a way to record my process - especially regarding the relationship graph. I find the sticky notes woefully inadequate for what I'd like to record: why I created a table occurrence group, what scripts relate to it, what assumptions were involved, etc. (I freely admit that this could be an indicator that my relationships are not sufficiently intuitive - perhaps others don't need additional descriptions). Ideally, I'd also like to be better able to document changes to the graph over time. Scripts, calculations, and CFs can certainly be more easily documented through comments - but these are still isolated. I can open up each calculation and read the comments -but I can't in one place describe which calcs, scripts and CFs were intended to work together for a particular function. I also wanted a better way to describe what I had done at a more overview level, and why I had decided to do something one way and not another way. This falls under the category of Architectural Knowledge Management, or Architectural Decision Recording. And I hoped to be able to tie all these different pieces together in some reasonably intuitive fashion. So all that said - here's a list of what I've tried and how well they've worked for me. Hopefully this will be helpful to some folks. I'll start with what I've found most helpful and mention the less successful ones after. 1. Enterprise Architext (Sparx) - this is a multipurpose UML modelling tool . It's quite affordable compared to most other such tools and very flexible. The learning curve is fairly steep - though if you have a lot of UML experience, you'll just need to learn the quirks of EA. You can create conceptual, logical and physical entity relationship diagrams or do database modelling, and re-use tables. Initially, I tried to recreate my structures in some detail, entering columns (fields), and creating specific connections. This ended up being much too time-consuming, and it was hard to model the idea of table occurrences effectively. I found it more helpful to create diagrams that documented key elements of relationship groups at a more conceptual level. EA allows many ways to add documentation - free floating notes, notes attached to elements, detailed documentation within elements, configurable tags and stereotypes, or connected external documents. It also allows creating maintenance elements for tasks, defects, issues and many others. An addin allows integration with Trac. (I initially used EA for bug tracking along with Trac – but I’ve now switched to Target Process, as described in another post). It is also an excellent tool for requirements, features, user stories etc – which can be tied to other elements (such as models of relationships). EA also supports a variety of approaches to version control. In addition, there are free addons to EA that allow more sophisticated architectural issue logging and decision recording, allowing for structured logging of problems, context, options considered and reasons for the chosen solution. Here are links for two of them. The decision architect add-in is no longer updated and does not work perfectly with the current version of EA but I’ve still had some luck with it. https://github.com/IFS-HSR/ADMentor/releases https://community.sparxsystems.com/white-papers/879-documenting-software-architecture-in-enterprise-architect The primary disadvantage of EA is effort – you need to invest time in learning it, configuring it to match your process and needs, and then maintaining it with enough discipline to remain useful and up to date. The big advantage of EA – if you have the time and patience – is the ability to use one tool to model and link user stories, use cases, features, requirements, releases, database structures, decisions and considerations, issues, defects, tasks linked to elements, change history, and more. I’ve also pasted in some calculations that required more explanation and scripts (you need to find a way to get the script into a pure ascii version that will be readable – I think I used FM Perception as an intermediary. Again - a lot of work.) If you need to generate formal documentation, again EA is incredibly powerful – and very time-consuming to master. 2. OneNote + SnagIT + ADR Templates A less structured but less time-consuming approach would be using a free-form tool like OneNote with some help. Rather than trying to recreate models of key elements of the relationship graph, one could grab screenshots of TOGs from the relationship graph and annotate them directly with something like SnagIt. Those could be then pasted into OneNote, which also offers simple tagging and excellent search. One could use sections and sections groups to document the graph, and another section to document architectural decisions (which could be hyperlinked to the TOG diagrams within OneNote). There are many templates available for those looking for a little more structure in their decision recording. See here for a good source: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision_record#how-to-start-using-adrs-with-tools If you use Git, there are also some Git tools for this purpose. Up until now, I’ve relied heavily on Enterprise Architect, but as I’ve moved a lot into Target Process (bugs, requests, features, user stories, tasks, release planning), there may be less benefit to EA- as such I may consider this lower tech approach, especially if I can find good ways to link back to entities in Target Process. TP also links to my SVN repository which is also helpful. But there's no good way to model the structure in TP (nor is it intended for that purpose), so it's only one part of the package. 3. Visio Visio is of course well-known. I initially tried using it – but found it was too limited and didn’t have enough power to justify the effort. EA is more work but vastly more powerful. You can certainly do conceptual relationship models in Visio, but EA offers far more options and flexibility. You won’t outgrow EA, but you well might Visio. 4. SQL (and other) DB Engineering Tools There are dozens of tools out there such as MySQL workbench, Valentina Studio, and many others. I tried a bunch. Some were able to connect to my FMP database through ODBC or JDBC, but FMI has not allowed the relationship graph to be fully accessible to these tools. DBSchema claimed filemaker compatibility, but at best, I was able to pull in the tables and fields from filemaker – but no relationships or keys. In the end, that wasn’t very helpful, and it didn’t allow updating over time without losing work I’d done to document things. In my experience, these tools don’t offer enough if you can’t actually fully connect to the database. A lot of effort for very little gain. May as well stick with FMP's sticky notes on the graph. 5. DDR Of course, the DDR generated by Filemaker could be used to document the database – that’s what it’s for. But there’s no way to add your own notes to it and maintain those the next time you generate a new DDR. 6. Base Elements I had high hopes for using Base Elements for this purpose. After all, it can show you every aspect of your database from about any perspective. And it even has fields for notes. But so far, there is no way to maintain those notes from one version to the next of your solution or of Base Elements itself. Currently, the notes feature in BE is more useful for making notes on desired changes or defects than for long-term documentation. (I’ve spoken to Nick at Goya about this and he appreciates the value of this capability, so perhaps it will be added in the future). 7. Dataedo This tool has some promise but is not quite there. Similar to the various SQL engineering tools it can connect to databases and extract structure and relationships. However, it is designed primarily for the purpose of documentation rather than as a database engineering tool, and as such seems to offer more power for this purpose. In particular, as databases change over time it does not wipe out existing documentation. It does not connect well to FMP either -but the developers have expressed an interest in exploring using the DDR to derive structure, while still maintaining continuity of the model. It remains to be seen if they’ll get there, but it’s worth watching. Please let me know if this is at all helpful. Michael

Currently, I'm running a FM development server (FDS) on a WHS2011 machine (based on Server 2008). This has been working fine. From what I read, FMS 17 will no longer work on Server 2008 based platforms, so I'm assuming WHS 2011 will not work. I figure I have a few options - 1) upgrade to something like Win Server Essentials 2016 that will support FMS 17 - a lot more expensive, may require new hardware, more hassle, and overkill for my needs 2) Consider the possibility of a Win 10 Pro -based machine to run it. I know that officially FMS is not supported on Win 10, but I've seen that people have been running FMS 16 on Win 10 Pro systems, so unless this changes with FMS 17, that might still be an option. 3) Upgrade to FM client 17, but stick with version 16 of the development server, since from what I've read that will work and none of the changes to FMS in 17 are necessary or even desirable for me. If I understand what I've read correctly, the new features in 17 Advanced are dependent on the client version and should still work on files hosted in FMS 16. I'm leaning towards 3, but would value any thoughts from other folks, especially if I'm missing any key issues. Thanks, Michael

In case anyone looks at this in the future, wanted to let you know that I believe I've come up with a decent workaround. I'm still working out the details, but it appears I can sell modules and have the seller use an http post to update the original account in my activation server with the new licensing info. Then, I can use Insert from URL to do an http post to retrieve license information from the server and determine if a user has the upgraded license. It isn't seamless, as the user has to manually enter their original activation key again since I still haven't figured out a way to communicate with the eleckey API from within Filemaker. (It might be that Scriptmaster could do it, but I probably won't invest the time to try right now). But it does get me a way to do a poor man's (person's) version of separately licensing modules .

By the way - can fields off the layout (over on the right) impact performance? Got it isolated to one field, unstored calc with eSQL statement, where it's taking the sum of a value in another table that is itself an unstored eSQL calc.

Yes - eSQL in calcs - been using those a lot to avoid extra table occurrence groups and relationships. Okay - will try what you suggested. Just for my understanding - can these cause this kind of delay even with so little data?

So I have a hosted solution, with a dashboard with a couple portals. When I go to scroll a portal, scrolling even one portal screen has a delay of a few seconds, ie I click the scroll bar or try to drag it, and it takes about 3 seconds before it moves. Running locally, it's instantaneous. Running on a dev server on my LAN, there's a slight delay, but minimal. Having read various threads about this situation, my first thought was it's due to a filtered portal, so I removed filtering, but that made no difference. I also read various posts about unstored calcs and other factors that would cause all the data to have to be transferred to the client over the WAN. But here's the thing - at the moment, there are about 20 records in the database, related to the particular portal. Clearly, moving that data can't be the primary issue - right? I do have a lot of Execute SQL calculations in related tables, and I've read that can cause poor performance. But wouldn't that only be a factor when there are a lot of records? Are there design /schema choices that would cause significant lag regardless of the amount of data? Thanks, Michael

Thanks Fitch!

Yes FMP/GO is enabled for the file. I did enable the local network sharing in the file before uploading to avoid getting errors about sharing not being enabled. Any chance that could cause problems?