Accounts vs Users

I loaded FMP 2024 yesterday but forgot to open “preferences” and define a named user. This omission caused various errors when I opened my database, because the startup script requires a defined user. To prevent this in the future I added a script step to display an alert if the user is not defined.

However, that made me wonder why Claris designed FMP this way. FMP clearly is designed to support multiple accounts. If I understand this correctly, all accounts have the same “user” as defined in Preferences.

This is probably basic info, but does anyone have insights or comments on this topic?

The user name is the name of the instance of FileMaker Pro. It can be the name of the computer or user as defined in the operating system or it can be a static name defined in FileMaker Pro's settings. The user name has nothing to do with an account name.

In short: the account name tells you who did what; the user name tells you where what was done.

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