Documenting Scripts

[CFisk]

I need to document several related FileMaker Pro databases, each with many scripts. I would like to export all the scripts into a Word file or Filemaker Pro database so that I can search them and print them out as I wish (more than one script per page). The only way I have found so far to do this is to use Acrobat PDF writer to create a PDF file of all the scripts for one database, and then paste each of the scripts one by one (page by page) from the PDF file into a Word file. That is very tedious. Has anyone found a better solution?

[RussKohn]

Brushfire is from Chaparral Software. You can find out about it at <http://www.chapsoft.com/brushfire>. I'm the owner of Chaparral and can answer most questions about this product if you want. We currently are shipping our Mac version and are about to start a beta of the Windows version.

[Kurt Knippel]

There are a couple of solutions for this kind of thing. Analyzer from Waves in Motion will do documentation, as well as Brushfire by ??.

There is also a product that allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff with scripts, like copying and pasting them, making mass changes to them and such. However I forget what the name is. I am sure that I found it by searching on Filemaker's website for plugins.

[Moon]

Take a look at Autoscript.fm Pro from Gregory Charles Rivers

[email protected]

He has a terrific product, very well documented (unlike anything from Waves In Motion) that makes copy and paste script activities easy. It adds one other feature that is really useful when copying scrits from one database to another: it can be set to create missing fields with the correct field names, simultaneously self-documenting the imported scripts with the fields that were missing. Importing scripts is much slower than the import built in to filemaker, but Autoscript's features and power make it much more versatile.

I give it five stars.

[SteveB]

What Moon failed to mention is that Autoscript only runs on a Mac...I got very excited until I checked their web site.

[Kurt Knippel]

It will however run on nearly ANY Macintosh system. Between AutoScript and Analayzer you will easily pay for an iMac, or Cube, or iBook, or whatever. Well worth the investment.

[RussKohn]

AutoScript is a very nice product for improving the abilty to reuse code. However, it does not document scripts. For that you need tools like FMD55, Analyzer or Brushfire.

FMD55 will provide either a FileMaker or a "phone-book" style XML/HTML approach with alphabetic listings of all scripts. Not bad but while easy to create, somewhat hard to use..also slow to open for large products. Links between external scripts are limited or missing so it is not as easy to navigate through a project and there is no way to see all the code of a single process in one place.

Analyzer will take a long time to process on a Mac but provide a rather complete analysis of all aspects of a solution. One of our 38 file solutions takes overnight to process for example.

Brushfire focuses on Scripts and provides what we feel is the best presentation of script information with complete cross-referencing, script trees, script/layout dependencies as well as a script error report and embedded IP report. Brushfire makes it easy to see all the code triggered by an script, including all subscripts and their subscripts no matter what file they are in.

Brushifre is also really fast. Typical solutions take less than a minute to process, with more complex projects taking just a couple of minutes. The solution I refer to above took about 4 minutes to process. So Brushfire can be used several times in the same day if you want.