Function points of a FM application

[sae1962]

Hi everybody!

I am a real newbie concerning FileMaker. Although I have more than five years development experience with RDBMS & a few month of DBA experience, I heard the first time of this tool last week. But you cannot know everything, can you? :

For a project analysis, I need to find out the complexity of an application made with the old FileMaker Pro 5.5. It has been in use by a company in the biomedical sector for more than fifteen years. It consists of 16 layouts, some having several tabs on them. This alone is not a sufficient information to deduce its complexity.

The project analysis I am expected to do is going to find out the number of statements and the number of data attributes used.

My question is how to find out this information easily, as I do not have weeks for searching the whole application for scripts etc., if there can be any functional "etc." other than scripts in FileMaker Pro 5.5.

Thank you very much for any comment!

[Fenton]

First, I moved your article to this forum, which seems best (for now). It was in the Articles, Tips forum, which is kind of a special one; we don't get that many of those. It doesn't much matter which forum a post is in, as far as others being able to see it, as most of us scan all posts via Recent Posts.

FileMaker is not like other database systems which are more programming and less interface. The downside of this is that it is more difficult to do a "report on structure". There are methods of doing that however, and tools to help. But, first, one has to ask what you're planning to do with this old system. It matters, because if you're going to convert it upwards to the latest version, then you would have more tools available to analyze it.

Also, one has to ask what your commitment would be. Such as, would you be willing to buy FileMaker Advanced, which costs more, but can do a Database Design Report (DDR). It would do most of your work for you, with a result of either HTML, which is readable, or XML, which can be further analyzed with other 3rd party tools. You would convert the ".fp5" file to ".fp7", by opening with the newer version. No sense messing around with 5.5.

Other than that, if you just want to get some idea of what you got, you can open File, Define Fields to see how many fields (data attributes?), Define Relationships to see how many of those, and Scriptmaker to see how many scripts (assuming you have the older version of FileMaker; the names of the menu items are slightly different in the latest version, "Manage..., Database..."). But the number of these things does necessary tell you how "complex" the solution is, not unless you have a feel for this.

If it's only 1 file, with 16 layouts, one wonders how the heck they managed to run a fairly complex business with it.