MDM was released a few years before 7, and was sold as an analysis tool for
developers, competing primarily with Brushfire and Analyzer. It was commonly
used for just that-- tracking down all the connections between various
'objects' in a complex Filemaker system. Particularly useful if you were
given a legacy system you needed to understand, or wanted to work through a
project you were considering taking on. Also good for figuring out if it
were safe to delete something-- a script, layout, even a field-- without
doing any damage.

But when 7 was released, they added the ability to find and remove dead file
references, as well as to build a comprehensive list of potential problem
areas for migration.

But, aside from that, it won't fix anything; rather, it helps the developer
see what needs fixing.


John Weinshel
Datagrace
Vashon Island, WA
(206) 463-1634
Member, FileMaker Business Alliance
Certified For FileMaker 8
Certified For FileMaker 7

-----Original Message-----
From: FileMaker Pro Discussions [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Peter Payne
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 8:08 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Playing with MetaDataMagic

I've downloaded the demo for MDM and am playing with it now. My FM6  
databases convert okay to FM8.5, although there are many oddities,  
such as relationships being messed up (my Invoices.fp5 relationship  
shows up as Invoices2, Invoices3, Invoices4, etc.) so I'm hoping I  
can use MDM to "clean" my databases before final conversion.

My question is, then, what exactly does MDM do? I see that it reads  
in all data, layout info, scripts and so on, and reports errors to me  
like invalid references in scripts and what not. Is this a tool to  
just find errors, or will it output a "clean" copy of my database for  
me, if I buy the correct version. Or just a way to find errors that  
might cause problems with I move to FM8.5?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer. 

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