I have never worked with filemaker pro before and have the responsibility to
take a poorly designed FM pro database and migrate it to MySQL or access.
The database table has no primary index and I could not think of a simple
method to populate an empty auto-increment type field. So far I have
started working with a ODBC connection to the database because the scripting
system in filemaker seemed a little too inflexible. If anyone has any
suggestions how I could get the job done faster it would be greatly
appreciated.

-Alex

In article <5dZJe.7578$%w.1566 (AT) twister (DOT) nyc.rr.com>, force010 (AT) hotmail (DOT) com
says...
Why? So you can have a poorly designed MySQL or Access database?

Just kidding!

Although I've run into so many cases of people doing just that...
starting with a bad design, blaming the database engine, and then
replicating the bad design on a new database engine that its just not
funny.

Its actually very easy. I'm assuming you've already got an empty auto-
increment field setup, since you are asking how to populate it.

Look up the "Replace" command in the help. The command itself is under
the "Records" menu. It will do what you require. In filemaker pro 7 the
help entry is titled "Replacing the Contents of a field".

And like anyone from mysql/access with no filemaker experience you chose
the absolutely most roundabout and complicated way of doing it.

See above. Good luck.

Thanks for the insight. Surprisingly, I take it that you believe the
scripting engine in filemaker is useful and worthwhile to learn? I couldn't
even figure out how to execute an SQL statement on the current database.


"42" <nospam (AT) nospam (DOT) com> wrote

In article <iq6Ke.7626$%w.6475 (AT) twister (DOT) nyc.rr.com>, force010 (AT) hotmail (DOT) com
says...
What sort of question is that?

If you were ever to actually develop a filemaker application it would be
essential. If not, then not.

Just as learning applescript is essential if your going to script macs
else worthless, or javascript is essential if your going to script
client side web content, or vb/vbscript is essential if you plan on
writing advanced macros for MS office, etc.

Why would it surprise you that filemakers script engine would be 'useful
and worthwhile' for writing an application in Filemaker?

That is actually pretty much the entire point of Filemaker. You don't
have to figure that out. You don't need to learn SQL to use FM.

FM isn't some fancy gui shell that hides you from an internal sql
parser. FM doesn't use SQL internally at all. It *can* parse SQL
commands via its ODBC support but its suboptimal at best.

Its different. And like anything its better at some things, worse at
others. There's a lot you can do with C++ and MySQL that you can't do
with Filemaker... but what you can do with filemaker will usually take
you orders of magnitude less time to both build and maintain than it
would to do with c++/mysql.

-regards,
dave