filemaker 9 development, 8.5 deployment

[oilcan]

Hey all,

This may be a pretty dumb question, and I'm not sure of quite the right forum section this should be in, but I feel I should put this out there to those a bit more knowledgeable than myself.

I have asked my boss to get a copy of filemaker 8.5 advanced, so I could have access to custom functions and other niceties for development purposes. She got us approved, however, she approved us for 9.0 advanced. We already have 8.5 deployed on several computers (about 7 of them), and upgrading all of them to 9.0 is probably not an option at this point.

Now, here's the question. Can you develop solutions using 9.0 that are usable in 8.5? The only experience I have with different versions of filemaker was converting from 5.5 to 8.5, in that case there were different extensions (.fp5, .fp7) and a conversion was necessary to use the data. I'm not aware if the extension is still .fp7 in version 9, and if so, if that even means necessarily that you could develop with 9 and still use the databases on the 8.5 machines. It would be nice having access to a few things in 9, and would save us some resubmitting of paperwork for budget approval etc. but I just have my doubts about this being feasible.

any feedback would be appreciated, thanks!

[The Shadow]

Yes, you can develop with 9 for 8.5 (all the way down to 7), as they all share the .fp7 extension.

What you need to avoid is using any of the new features added in 9, like conditional formatting - as it will have no effect for users running with 8.5.

[oilcan]

thank you for your help. kind of how i imagined it to be, but having it confirmed is what i needed. thanks again.