What are the real benefits of getting Developer 7? I've been working for a small consulting company for the past few years and somehow have ended up redoing their databases in Filemaker 7. They had all been in Filemaker 3. I had 0 experience with filemaker or really databases in general before I started working here, but now I'm preparing to leave the company and they've asked me if I'd be willing to do some contract work for them and one of their clients developing a database, since they think I know what I'm doing.

Will Developer make the databases any better? and will it save me any time my first go around, or is it just the sort of thing that makes things faster after you've gone through the process a couple of times?

I appreciate any thoughts.

Jeff

The Script Debugger can save you hours of fiddling with a script that isn't working quite right. And the Database Design Report is simply awesome! It shows you all instances of fields, tables, TOs, scripts, layouts, relationships; where each field can be found in a script, layout, or relationship; and (my favorite) all buttons on a layout attached to single script steps or a full script, and the text (if any) that is on a button.

Needless to say, it is incredibly useful when cleaning up an old file, taking over someone else's work, cleaning up your own development and removing unused or redundant items, or making sure fields/scripts/layouts/relationships aren't attached to anything important before you remove them, instead of unintentionally breaking your solution and trying to repair it later.

There are also Developer Utilities for renaming solutions, creating runtimes, etc.

I would say, if you will be doing any of the above, it could be highly worth the purchase.

You also get a development license for Filemaker Server Advanced, so you can test your solution in a FMS environment and test custom web solutions w/o buying a full version of FMSA for yourself.

And don't forget custom functions... They can simplify your calculations by allowing reuse of common code, and they can also be recursive, so there are some new things you can accomplish without needing scripts.

Dana