Recently, I have had situations where Filemaker 8.0 Server Advanced (on Mac 10.4) was acting strange. Relationships and searches weren't working correctly on certain fields. For example, say you have Customer X with a Customer ID of 5. I could view Customer X and it's customer ID, but if you searched on the Customer ID, you got no results. And any relationships that depended on Customer ID did not see Customer X. To fix this, I would foce the indexes for the Customer X field to be rebuilt by changing its Indexing to None, and then back to All.

Unfortunately, this has now happend a few times over the past 6 months, all for different fields. This seeems to happen to some of the most commonly accessed fields (Customer ID, Payment ID, Invoice Number). So clearly the indexes are becoming corrupt with heavy use over time.

I have two questions:

What is the best method to force FileMaker to rebuild all indexes for all fields in a file? Does a Save As Compressed do it? Or should I do a Recover, and then imort into a non-recovered file? Is there a best practice for how to do this?

Secondly, is there a way with FileMaker Server Advanced to automate this process? I would love to set this up as a weekly or monthly process. Any recommendations for a method or frequency?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Eric

Check that FM Server and *all* of the client computers are updated to the latest patch version of 8.0. Earlier patch versions of the client had an index-corrupting bug.

see Answer ID 5686

http://filemaker.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/filemaker.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=5686

Recover does re-index, but might remove unexpected portions of your files

greg