Filemaker 8.5 Migration

[iainwest]

Hi all,

 

We are currently migrating our internal Filemaker system from version 5/6 to version 8.5. In doing this, we will for a short period, be keeping version 5/6 on the web.

 

Currently we import active data overnight into the web database and manually copy over the databases each morning. To keep this practice running with version 8.5 I was looking at talking from 8.5 to 6 via ODBC, however this has caused a few issues with repeating fields, container fields and unstored calculations.

 

Does anybody have any suggestions in how I get the communication to work from 8.5 to 6?

 

Many thanks in advanced.

[AHunter3]

The live data is in 8.5?

 

Why not make some layouts in 8.5 and web-enable them? Or is shelling out for Advanced Server just not a viable option right at the moment?

 

FileMaker is less-than-great at backwards compatibility with its own products (you can't export a dataset as a FileMaker 4 file, for instance). You can export as a Merge file (.mer) which does nicely for the alphanumeric data but doesn't deal very nicely with container-field data. Are you really storing images (or other container data) in FileMaker 8.5 that you wish to make live on the web? Could you switch to storing references to imagefiles (and etc), which would allow you to import the path-to-file and utilize that to make those images visible to web-browsing folk?

 

As for repeating fields, they are an abomination in the eyes of God and will frustrate and annoy you at every turn until you abandon their use anyhow. (Seriously, I have yet to deploy them without significant regrets later on). You could run a looping script that runs through all the repetitions and writes their data into a single field with some kind of delimiter, and then on the other end in Fm6 parse it all back out and write it to repetitions, using a similar looping script. Assuming that no one would ever skip Repetition 7 and put data in Repetion 8 or anything, the possibility of which makes it difficult to know when to Exit Loop.

[Ender]

Yeah, unless the solution is not very integrated, it's much easier to keep your users on the old version until you're ready to move everyone to your updated migrated or rewritten soluton in the new version. Then you won't have to deal with moving data between the versions.