Progress Monitor & Serial Number Clean-up

[John McCreery]

I am using Filemaker to store large quantities of data for export to PAJEK, a program used for social network analysis. Two issues have come up for me.

Because the processing takes a very long time (several hours running in background on my Mac mini), I would very much like to have a widget that monitors progress, e.g., by telling me which of several hundred events the script is currently working on. If anyone knows of one, I would be very grateful.

The other problem is more serious. Serial numbers used as primary keys in the original data contain gaps where records were created and then deleted due to data entry errors. No problem for Filemaker as long as relations with foreign keys remain intact. PAJEK, however, requires a continuous series of integers with no gaps as labels for events. If I use a script (or any other technique) to renumber the primary keys, will the changes be reflected automatically in the foreign keys? If so, I'm home free. If not, what, oh what, shall I do?

[Vaughan]

"If I use a script (or any other technique) to renumber the primary keys, will the changes be reflected automatically in the foreign keys?"

No, you'll have to somehow manage these yourself. Usually this involves finding the records and replacing the old key with the new key.

The smart way to do it is to create a new key field so you can leave the old (working) fields in place. That way it's easy to get a couple of goes at it, otherwise you'll be spending a lot of time re-importing the data.

"several hours running in background on my Mac mini..."

PPC or Intel? You'll probably quarter the time with an Intel mini.