I've got a file that was exhibting corruption in a layout element. A tab control was acting bizarrely, expanding and ghosting when switching between panels in both Layout and Browse Modes.

I deleted the entire layout and built it again, unfortunately, while working in that file, it appears to be crashing every other time (or so) I use it.

So that file is hosed.

I've got back ups, but how do I know which one is safe? The tab panel was a new element on one of the first layouts. So how do I know when the corruption began? I'm wondering if I can save time by copying & pasting different elements but I don't know if "corruption" will get "transferred". Frankly I don't know what corruption is, except it's really annoying.

Does anyone know if I can do any of the following from a corrupted file to a new one WITHOUT transferring the corruption?

Import tables

Copy and paste tables

Copy and paste fields into Manage Database

Copy and paste scripts

Copy and past script steps

Copy and past layout elements

I suspect script steps would be safe, but I don't know about anything else.

Thanks

Just off the top of my head, I imagine MyFMButler's ClipManager might shed some light on the corruption, since when you copy layout/table elements to the ClipManager clipboard they come over in FileMaker's internal XML format - which might shed some light on the issue..

Never tried it on a corrupted layout element, though - or even if a corrupted element can actually be copied.

I've got a copy of ClipManager, if you want to toss me a clone off-list to try it on. Point me to a suspect element. Basically I'm curious.

Thanks. I'll post it here in case anyone else wants to take a look but if you want to take it to a PM that's fine too.

BTW, this behavior shows up on OSX 10.4.11 and WinXP SP2 (via Parallels).

User: Admin

Pass: admin

Damaged_Panel_Clone.fp7.zip

That's funky. Looking at it now, I'll let you know if I find anything interesting.

For what it's worth. Yeah, that tab panel is wonky; it seems to have 2 right endings. But the file is not crashing for me. It doesn't seem to care if I move the panel around or whatever. When I create a new panel and put the stuff in it, it seems fine. So maybe it's just the panel. A little unnerving though.

That was fun.

The first tab panel had the following defined for its bounds:

1

The second:

17

It was this second right bound that was causing the ghosting; changing it to 858 and pasting it back in with ClipManager produced the object on the new last layout in the attached file.

I wouldn't necessarily use this for production; I was just curious as to what the story was.

Well, that's what I thought. But a couple days later, FM started regularly crashing on me when I was working on the file. I do believe in coincidences (maybe the first crash was unrelated and caused the others, etc), but how can I know?

I don't know a whole lot about XML or ClipManager (though I'm downloading the demo now) but is the entire tab control defined as well as the tab panels? And if so, what are its bounds?

Thanks for taking an interest.

Edited February 1, 200817 yr by Guest
typo

I included the XML for the whole Tab Control in the new layout. Yeah, the XML snippet that manages the parent control is:

0

So it was just the second panel that was exceeding the right bound of the control.

Doesn't really address why this corruption creeps in, and since we don't know all that's going on in the background, this isn't really a fix. I was happy to look at it, I learned something

Plug: ClipManager's a great product. We have a site license over here, and use it pretty extensively for moving object groups in batch to different contexts - you can run find/replace operations on the XML and paste it back into FileMaker, so that means you can replace all occurrences of "TABLE1::" with "TABLE2::". Sweet.