Determine safety of deleting table occurrence

[Pumpkin_Escobar]

Hi Everybody,

First time, long time.  I inherited a FM solution that I'm trying to pick apart to understand.  One aspect is that table occurrences were named with default names (table name 1, table name 2, etc).   Another aspect is that some tables are related to multiple occurrences of the same table (table 1 has two relationships based on the same key to table 2, table 2's occurrences have default names, i.e. table 2_1, and table 2_2).

So here I come, trying to figure out what is going on.  My question is, how can I determine if it is safe to delete a table occurrence (such as table 2_1 in the above example)?  I seem to get the same error when I go to delete table 2_1 as I do when I try to delete table 2.  Since I didn't put this solution together and there are a lot of parts, I don't feel safe is deleting anything.

Thanks for any advice.

[Ocean West]

It's hard to say you first have to determine what dependencies scripts / layouts and other are using the table occurrence.

the easiest way to do so is to use the a Database Design Report then analyze it with something like FMPerception or Inspector you can determine if schema is safe to delete.

 

[Pumpkin_Escobar]

Thanks, that's what I think I was trying to find out, whether there was a utility (built in or not) that would analyze and report.

Any other suggestions from the community?

[Fitch]

The Database Design Report (DDR) mentioned above is under the FileMaker Tools menu if you have enabled the advanced options in your preferences. This is in FM17 and newer. In older versions, FileMaker Advanced was a separate product. Please set your version and OS in your profile here so we can better answer your questions.

Once you have the DDR, as Ocean West says there are various tools you can use to work with it. My go-to is BaseElements.