A Useful FileMaker Conversion Tool Built Economically with LiveCode

Find out how David Simpson created a great little tool using the PolyGrid in LiveCode to automate a large project for a client. The very modest amount of time invested in creating the tool potentially saved hundreds of hours of tedious work.

The Customer Requirement

This tool was built as a custom app for a large FM6 to FM19 conversion project having 153 files and thousands of scripts across the entire solution. With a solution this large, there are numerous changes required to upgrade it for full functionality with FileMaker Pro 19. Why so many files? Well, before FileMaker 7 the FileMaker product could only handle 1 table per file. Today, we would likely put all of those tables into a single file to make it easier to develop and manage the application and user accounts.

First, there are 20-year-old outdated plug-ins that are no longer available. This tool helps automate the task of finding and updating these old plug-in functions to use new built-in commands. Another very time-consuming manual task is updating scripts to include Commit Records steps because these weren’t required in FM6, but they are required with newer FileMaker versions. Newer versions of FileMaker Pro give developers more control over the process of committing records into the database to enable both transactional commit and rollback functionality.