Hi there.

I'm trying to convert the company's current FM5 solution, to now, FM8. So far it's going pretty smoothly, except for the fact that I'm having to break some flatfile parts down into a proper relational system. Again, that's not so much of a problem, except for the number of fields I have to go through. Basically I'm making copies of the flat file, relating them, and then deleting the unused fields in each.

So yeah, I'm just looking to know... is there an easier way to do this?

I think a better approach is to think about all the stuff that your are tracking with your solution, and break it down on paper into separate Entities. Think about what the ideal structure would be if you were starting from scratch. Sketch it out into a Entity-Relationship Diagram (there's lots of info on the web or in books about how to make data models.)

Once you know what the structure should be, you can see if your current file can be used as the starting point (this may be convenient if there's a ton of layouts.) For all the additional tables, I would add those manually, either in the same file, or separate files if needed. In my experience, you end up with a cleaner structure if you only add the things you need, rather than trying to remove the things you don't need. When normalizing, you usually end up with a lot fewer fields anyways, so adding them by hand shouldn't be too hard.

If you've ever had to recover this file, then you may be better off rebuilding the file(s) from scratch, as that corruption can recur unexpectedly in FM7 (and maybe FM8?)

Thanks. I kind of thought as much. Just that I'm a lazy bugger.

Seriously though, yeah, thinking about it, it probably will be best to go that way. It's just among other things having to know which fields were in the original table, in order to copy them manually, is annoying when there's 50 of them, never mind many times that.