MySQL ESS Question

[Teutonic_Night]

I'm working on developing a app that uses FM to do some importing and data normalization, and then stores the resultant data in a MySQL backend for further processing.

FM Server is on a Mac running OS X 10.4.10 server, and we're using the Actual Technologies Open Source Database driver.

I have the ESS set up, and am able to read and write from/to it with no apparent problems. However, we've had to add fields to a few of the MySQL tables during development, and these newly added fields are not apparently visible to FileMaker. We added a table, and that table showed up in the data source list- it's apparently only changes to fields in existing tables that cause a problem.

The only work-around I've found so far is to delete the data source from the FileMaker file and recreate it. After that, all of the new fields are visible in the various tables. The problem with this is that it breaks all the references to the ESS, causing a *lot* up editing in scripts and layouts. My MySQL guy seems to think that FileMaker is caching the table definitions, and just not refreshing them.

Has anyone else run into this, and if so, have you found any better workarounds?

[Teutonic_Night]

Ok, nevermind. I just found the "Sync" button in the Manage Database tool Fields tab. For anyone else who encounters this issue, go to Manage Database, select the Fields tab, choose the external data source you want to update from the drop-down menu, then click on the Sync button. Any table schema changes will be transferred to the FileMaker "shadow table", but you may lose any options you've set in FileMaker for a field if the same option isn't set for the field in the SQL data source. It's a one-way sync from the external source to FileMaker, apparently.