Product Reviews

As a Trekkie who spends more time working in FileMaker than he spends eating (which may come as a shock to any dieticians who know me), the arrival of FileMaker 6.0 is something of a relief: as any Trekkie will tell you, don't bother watching the odd-numbered Star Trek sequels, as they're not worth the popcorn. FileMaker 6.0 definitely adheres to the 'even-numbered sequel' theory. Unlike 5.0, which made you upgrade your entire suite of machines, or 5.5, which had some nice stuff, but only in the developers' version, 6.0 delivers some rather useful functionality that the everyday FileMaker user will appreciate and actually be able to use.

Let's start with those niggle-fixes. Under Mac OS X, long filenames of up to 255 characters are now supported, as are filename extensions such as .fp5, .tif, .jpg and so on, and the items on the services menu (open URL, Execute Text) work and are no longer there just for show.

For OS X, OS 9 and OS 8.6, date entry has been cleaned up so that entering two-character years - for example, 02 and 98 instead of 2002 and 1998 - gives the expected result. Default script steps are no longer included whenever you create a new script, but there's still no support for cutting and pasting script steps.

Export duty
Almost all the remaining dialogs are now resizeable and remember their on-screen positions. Layout themes and template files have been tarted up, and Web companion security has been beefed up so that the Web folder is no longer open to prying eyes. OS X now supports ODBC import and export, as well as the Execute SQL script step.
Cosmetically, there are also a few subtle changes. Keyboard shortcuts have been changed in Layout mode, and there's now a Format Painter command that allows you to take all the formats from the selected object and copy them to any other object on the layout simply by clicking. In practice, however, you can only format one item at a time, and there's no keyboard shortcut for the command, which means you have to keep moving back and forth between the layout and the menu bar.

There are four big new features. First, a proper Find & Replace: you can find and replace text in both Layout and Browse modes, across all records or just the current records, and across all fields or just the current field. No more having to write Replace... scripts so that end users can

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fix their own data. This feature alone is worth the upgrade, and you wonder why it has been absent for so long.

Second, you have two new options for the standard Find: Constrain or Extend Found Set. In other words, you can narrow your search by applying the current find to just those records in the current found set. You can also add the results of the next find to the current found set. While previously this was possible using AppleScript, it will come as a revelation to users who have difficulty with the concepts of omitting and multiple requests. And, in Browse mode, control-clicking a field brings up an updated context menu that includes Sort Ascending and Sort Descending, so some users may never need to use a dialog again.
Third, FileMaker has started to bring in functionality previously only available through plug-ins. You can now define a simple custom dialog, which doesn't provide all the features of, say, Troi Dialog, but is fine for most purposes.

Finally, version 6 has bitten the bullet when it comes to dealing with external files. The reorganised Import menu can now import folders of text and image files. When importing text files, you have access to the filename, path and contents, which you can plonk into fields of your choice. When importing images, you import the image, filename, path and also an image thumbnail, and you can choose to import image by reference as well to save space. You can even directly import from a digital camera under OS X.

XML is supported properly at last in FileMaker Pro. You can both import and export data in XML format, using standard style sheets or custom XLST files. You can import from a file, or directly from a URL somewhere on the Web. The demo files included with the beta are sparse on this point, but once version 6 is released FileMaker will be providing XSLT sheets on its Web site that should allow you to directly export to a multisheet Excel file or Adobe SVG graph, or import data direct from your stockbroker's Web site.

Performance arts
FileMaker claims the OS X version has 'improved performance'. Even in standard use, the word 'nippy' comes to mind. As a rough guide, with the MacUser test script run in a cloned file (which involved creating 10,000 records, populating with data using individual set field, performing a global replace, performing a find, including indexing a text field and deleting records), the pre-release application shaved 23% off the time taken by a copy of FileMaker Pro 5.5. What's more, unlike the previous whole-number upgrade, it plays nicely with others: you don't have to move all your machines straight to 6.0. It will also talk happily to Server 5.

So should you buy a copy when it's released? If you didn't upgrade to 5.5, then yes. If plug-ins make you squeamish and you're working with images or external text files, need to get data off or on to the Web, or want to squeeze more hours out of a day, then definitely yes.