Help with a corrupt file?

[PeterinJapan]

Hello, all. I've got a fairly simple database I use for creating tweets for social media, but it's clearly got some damage, as I occasionally get a "color wheel of death" followed by "can't write data" errors, followed by a long random string of text. Quitting and reloading the database makes it work again for another 30 mins or so, but it's frustrating.

Following Filemaker's advice, I tried saving a compacted version of the database. But when I use the database, I get new problems, like the error below followed by another dialogue that says Error -1700, which doesn't seem to exist. Specifically, in the compacted version (and ditto if I recover the database, which I also tried before), my Applescript below causes an error, because it can't access the field "time" in the database, although this works perfectly in my non-compacted, non-recovered database).

tell application "FileMaker Pro"
tell database "socialmedia.fp7"
set theTime to field "time" of current record 
end tell
end tell

So, can anyone tell me what to do? Remaking the database from scratch is something I'd like to avoid, but I can't see any better choice for the moment. Is there any way to export or copy/paste fields and paste them into a fresh database? Anyway, thanks for any help you can offer!

[comment]

11 hours ago, PeterinJapan said:

Is there any way to export or copy/paste fields and paste them into a fresh database?

Try exporting your data as XML using the FMPXMLRESULT grammar. Then open the resulting XML file in Filemaker. If the export was successful, it will be converted into a new FMP file containing all the exported fields and their data. However, all schema components (calculation fields, relationships, scripts, layouts etc.) will have to recreated. 

If your original file has additional tables, export each one separately and import them into the new file while selecting 'new table' as the target.

Resist the temptation to copy/paste anything directly from the old file to the new one.

[PeterinJapan]

Thanks! I'll give it a try. 

Hmm, I am exporting everything to XML using that FMPXMLRESULT and no style sheet. When I try to import it I get another error. Any ideas what I should do?

 

[comment]

Hard to tell without seeing the XML file. It's possible that your FMP file is too corrupted to perform the export correctly.

Make a copy of your FMP file and run a recovery on the copy. Then try exporting from the recovered file. If you still get an error when importing, try opening the XML file in a text editor and look for invisible characters as well as other obvious defects.