I'm getting ready to upgrade from FM 5.5 to 7, what kind of problems should I expect?

ie. Layouts, scripts, relationships, etc..

Version: v5.x

Platform: Windows XP

From my limited experience:

1. Read the techbrief on FM's website.

2. Remove, if possible, all passwords and recreate in 7.

3. Check field defs for inappropriate field names, ie (State/ZIP).

get ready for font display problems.

See http://www.filemaker.com/upgrade/techbriefs.html

And there will be an additional one on Migration Methodologies later this week at the same site.

Read them. You'll be happy you did.

Steven

I did a coversion of a complex solution that has well over 120 database files in it. It took some time, but completed with few errors. The biggest problem I found was that complex scripts need to be reworked. I think that everything converted correctly, because on first glance the scripts look fine, but I think that certain behaviors are no longer the same.

Also the sheer amount of old/bad file references is staggering.

After upgrading files from 5.5 to 7, I have one field with 10 repetitions, but only the first one works...

in the followings repetitions nothing appears ...

Can somebody help me .... (all others fields with repetition work fine)...

Is it a calculation or possibly a related calculation? Give us more specifics, if you will.

In fact this field is only a copy of price store in a file called price list.

I enter item number and name, and price come out un the invoice.

But if items' names come out all along, price appears in the first raw only...

Thanks

Version: v7.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

One thing you can expect is _very_ slow importing and deleting. I converted a file from fp5 to fp7 that is pretty simple (maybe about 20 fields, a few lookups and 10 or 15 calculated fields) in order to take advantage of the increased file size limit. Although it's a simple database, I frequently need to load several million records into it, and when it hits 2 GB (in v.6), it crashes hard and the whole thing melts down. In this case, after converting a clone of the file from 5, I started to import a .dbf file with about 115,000 records. Over 4 hours later, it had only imported 5,100 records, even though Activity Monitor showed it using 27% of my CPU cycles. I finally stopped the import process, and decided to delete the 5,100 records it had imported. That was 10 minutes ago, and it still hasn't finished deleting the records. This is so slow it's unusuable.

FileMaker Version: Dev 7

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

I have a similar problem as FritzMills. When calculating commissions for our sales staff we use an empty file in which we import sales records (about 7000) and after some tests and we run three relookups to add personal data for payments (like account number). These relookups takes about 14 times longer to perform in filemaker pro 7 on a Dual 2GHZ G5 (3.5GB RAM, Mac OS 10.3, standard serial ata) then on a G4 733MHZ (512 MB RAM, Mac OS 9.1, ATTO silicon disk (RAM Disk)) with FM5.5.

Has anyone else had problems with unusually slow relookups/imports in FM7?

/Keda

I've had two problems ... both are annoying me to no end, and will cause me to temporarily back up to V6.

1. Value lists that had two fields display, such as "Customer_ID" and "Customer_Name" -- and they were set to sort on the second field (Customer_Name). In v5 and v6, I could enter the Customer_ID field in a table, the value list would display as a pop-up list, and I could then type in the first few letters of the customer's name, and it'd jump right to that record, grab the ID and stick it in the Customer_ID field. Same for other situations such as Product_ID and Product_Name.

Now with V7, this behavior is broken, and it only responds to typing in of the numeric Customer_ID. Obviously, that's no use at all - if I knew everyone's Customer ID I wouldn't need a lookup. This even though the "sort on second field" box is still checked.

So far, Filemaker support is stumped. I've got tons of these lookups and they're all useless to me now.

2. Value lists are very very slow - a couple of seconds delay in displaying the values, then after selecting one, a couple of seconds delay in sticking that value into the field. Maddening. The behavior improved slightly after a hard drive defragment, but still there is a noticeable lag opening things that were instantaneous on V6. These are small value lists (5 or 10 values), in the same data file.

Anyone else experience these problems?

Chris

If you have a multi page database when you print and if the text is set to sliding for the titles on a layout. They disapear on all except the first record for anything that has to slide across a page break. Also repeating fields with borders don't seem to be consistant on showing text base lines. Also large multi line text fields do not wrap text.

One thing you can expect is _very_ slow importing and deleting.

I have the same problems. This is a serious bug and I wonder why they did not detect it before releasing 7v02. What's the solution?? Downgrade??

I also have noticed the problems with slower response times. I've been using Filemaker Server on the previous versions, though, so I wasn't sure if this was a problem due to just running it on my own computer while upgrading.

Is there someone here using Server 7? Is this also the case?

Matt