Waves in Motion has releases a major upgrade to Analyzer, their FileMaker Pro development tool. Analyzer is used to examine and report on a FileMaker project. The new version includes performance enhancements, new features and other improvements. According to Waves in Motion:
Ask a room full of typically vociferous FileMaker developers what they like least about their job, and most will tell you it's the prospect of making changes to projects with hundreds or even thousands of elements, countless cross references, and no documentation. Then present them with a development tool to help them through these problems, and they'll let you know quickly how you can make that better, too.
Version 2.0 of the Analyzer now digs even deeper into your FileMaker projects, clearly and automatically documenting every field, every layout, every relationship, every value list, and every script . . . all bundled together with a host of customer-driven improvements:
- 300% increase in the speed of processing and interpreting large projects
- extensive hotlinking between the different parts of the Analyzer's project database
- improved script tracing
- broader search capabilities and reporting features
- expanded information gathering, including every aspect of every field in a project
One of the most innovative features in version 2.0, and one that will appeal to anyone responsible for large FileMaker projects, is the small, but powerful Problem Dot. The Analyzer now automatically searches through all the scripts in a project and marks any file containing an error, including such things as broken relationships, missing fields, and missing layouts. Click on a file name and you'll find another Problem Dot next to each problem script. Click on a script and continue to follow the dots straight to the bugs.
You can even move through scripts step by step, or let the Analyzer trace through an entire script for you and build a hierarchical report of every instruction, every external script, and every recursion it finds. These trace reports are even color-coded to help you better see just what is going on.
You can generate a Problem Report that summarizes all the problems found by the Analyzer, or perform your own customized searches across all the files in your project. Search for a field name, a status function, or any of the standard FileMaker terms built into the Analyzer search engine. Or search through all the scripts in a project for outdated procedures or elements that no longer exist.
Developers can also use the Analyzer to generate summarized or detailed project reports. To choose one example: the detailed report for a particular field includes a list of all the layouts that include the field, every script that uses the field, every relationship that references the field, and every calculation that requires a value from that field. The Analyzer indicates the type for each field, if a field is indexed or not, and the number of repetitions for each field. For calculation fields, Analyzer displays the calculation and the field type returned by the calculation.
