FMP5 crashes when exporting too many records

[MicahMason]

I've got a problem. The organization I am working for is trying to export 655 records. Doing them all at once causes FMP 5 to crash to the desktop. If I'm lucky, I don't have to recover my files. I can get it to work in smaller batches, but even then its not consistent and will crash sporadically.

I'm running on Win2k with 128meg ram. The database is running stand alone. The procedure I'm using is to use the Export Records function to export to a tab delimited file. I am sorting on two related last-name, first-name fields. The export consists of fields from several related records as well as fields from the current db. The crash happens somewhere after the first 60 records, and it sometimes crashes immediately to the desktop, while other times it puts up some dialogs saying an error has happened. This is repeatable. it is also very severe, since we've had to restore the db from a backup once already because of unrecoverable corruption. I need as much info about this as possible because if we cannot fix this we will need to start evaluating other software since this database appears to be getting unstable.

I've just discovered more information. When I examine the partial export, I noticed that some records have blank last name and first name fields. However, inside the database there are no fields that have blank last name and first name fields. This suggests that there is something internal that is out of sync. Is there any way to fix this, either automatically or by hand? I've tried the recover command and it does not do this.

Thank you.

[MicahMason]

I discovered the bug. Some of the relationships linked to records that did not exist. So while trying to export the related fields for those records worked sometimes, it also crashed Filemaker sometimes.

I would venture to say this is a bug in filemaker, since at the least it should exit gracefully from this situation. The crash occurred after going through around 90 records with non-existed related records.

[Vaughan]

Make sure you are using the latest version of FMP. That's either FMP 6.0v3 or FMP 5.5v3 or whatever. It's the "v3" part that's important here. Get the updater from the FileMaker web site.

Can you send us the files so we can test it out?

[MicahMason]

Unfortunately the data is sensitive and the organization I am contracting for does not want it distributed, so I cannot send you the actual files.

I will check and make sure the version is updated. I will also be happy to assist you in replicating the crash.