Rebuild from scratch or import?

November 28, 200718 yr

Howdy, all:

The silicon gods have not been kind to my latest FM 9 solution; it has suffered many an indignity--it's been recovered six times, upgraded from FM 7 to 8 to 8.5 then 9, was inadvertently running when Norton 360 was doing its scan with the FM file open--that I want to ensure that I have a clean "gold" version before I release it to my current client. To my discredit, I didn't back up the master file as often as I should have--and have made so many changes to it--that I don't have an old file that I can easily run FMDIFF to see where the bad blocks could be and such.

So, I'm thinking of rebuilding the file from scratch. Should I cut-and-paste the layouts from the old version to the new one and then manually retype all the code, or...? What the least painful way of proceeding?

Cheers,

Rich

November 28, 200718 yr

I'll probably get shot down on this but it appears that the 'Recover' process in FM9 is doing significantly more than before. I wonder if it is still so imperative to discard them? I own up to not having done so pre-9 with rarely a problem.

Anyway, it is reputed that saving a a clone and importing the data to that is OK. Whether this covers layout corruption, I don't know.

There is tool, FMDiff, that can find the corruption:

http://www.fmdiff.com/index.html?session=5312cc81d2b26dd1b03a7607c7ecddc3

Norman

November 28, 200718 yr

Author

Thanks for the reply, Norman!

I checked out FMDIFF, but the problem is that I don't have a "clean" comparison file available.

One example is the ipoint.exe problem: when using a Microsoft brand wireless mouse (with a PC, not a Mac), it causes an FM file to shudder and flicker on-screen. By shutting down the ipoint.exe (process) file, the shuddering and flickering stops. Great.

However... (and there's always a 'however')

Now that I'm back to using a wired mouse, I still get the shuddering and flickering effect so something in the file was corrupted. (The problem isn't machine specific, by the way.)

Since this in important runtime for a client (and potentially very lucerative), for peace of mind I'll rebuild the file from scratch. That way, if something weird happens to the master file and my client takes me to task, I'll shrug my shoulders and will blame Windows...just like all the other developers do. :