Merging two tables automatically?

[brian rich]

I'm in the process of rebuilding a legacy database which went bad, at which point we found all the back-ups were bad too.

This database was built pre fmp6, and has relationships set up with a whole bunch of other FMP databases, most of which have relationships which point back to this one. As it consists of some 160+ layouts, 19000+ objects and nearly 600 scripts, we took the decision to apply FMPromigrator to the rebuild. This did 80% of the donkey work for us, and after fixing the other 20%, we now have a rebuilt version which appears to be correct, or so we thought...

When FMPro Migrator is used, it creates a new FMP database which contains a table called = Placeholder TO. This is a temporary table which is used as a reference for the system whilst doing the rebuild. The other 8 tables have been rebuilt correctly, with the 'main' table, Works Orders now the second table in the database below the = Placeholder TO table. All the external references to this table have been reconstructed correctly.

The problem comes when you put the new file in place of the old one. When you go to the external files, instead of linking to the Works Orders table, they all link to the = Placeholder TO table, but the relationships fail because the relevant fields are not there. If you copy the fields from Work Orders to = Placeholder TO, the links now work, but the = Placeholder TO table does not contain any data, so the relationship is still broken.

What I need to do is to find a way of 'merging' the Works Order and the = Placeholder TO tables into a single table preserving both the internal and external references. Is there any way of doing this automatically, or am I faced with doing it manually for each relationship?

We are using FMP11Advanced on Windows 7. The databases are normally hosted on a FMP11 Server advanced, but for this exercise we are rebuilding offline.

Thanks

Brian

[Aussie John]

You could copy and paste the fields into the other table and then import the data. Likely to mess up any scripts and relationships so some manual tweaking would be required.