I am completely rewriting my solution from scratch in FM7 and am preparing to port the data to the new solution. I am in FM 5.5 with about 12 files and will end up with two FM7 files, one with the data and another with all the images ( scanned patient information ). In a few months I need to go live with the FM 7 solution. Being a physician office I have little room for error and my nurses are very unwilling beta testers, when I go live I cannot afford to go backwords to then try and go forward again. They will kill me and good nurses are hard to find.

My 12 files are very complex and initial attempts to convert to FM 7 files were not succesful ( too many exceptions and complex relationships ).

My initial thought is to:

1) create clones of the 5.5 files, eliminate all of the relationships, layouts and lookups and scripts, making them very easy to conver to 7( lets call them shells ).

2) On the transfer date import the 5.5 data into the shells.

3) Convert these loaded shells to 7.

4) Import these 7'd shells into the FM7 solution

5) Go live and get ready for my nurses to kill me.

I think I would try this a few weeks before to see if it works, then try again at the live date.

Any helpful suggestions?....

THANKS

You can save yourself the trouble of making the clones & importing into the clones: export from the live files to the FileMaker format. That will effectively create new fp5 files but with just the data.

Convert those to 7 and import into your new files.

HTH

Wim