FMPerception is a very good tool. You want to know what's in a file or group of file, that's the tool to use. It will show you things you were not aware of. The information it provided is rich. You think you've seen all that's interesting in you solution . . . think again, there are aspects you didn't look at because you didn't know/notice they were available. And these can point you to things that needs to be corrected. An example: external sources that doesn't exist anymore. Don't try by yourself to find out the dark spots in you app, FMPerception will beat you at that !
Now regarding refactoring, we ALL know that's near to impossible at this time. Those of you that watched the preview presentations - except for the one is November 2019 which lead to about nothing but marketing instead of technical - had many hints that it's coming by pieces. Just think about the add-ons installation that can create tables and change the schema ! Personally, I would like eventually to be able to script those changes, for example to update existing solutions X times, instead of manually triggers them. Just run a script and wait for it to finish.
Yeah! I have Altova Diff Dog and was quite disappointed with the results. I ended up saving the DDRs as PDFs and did a pdf compare and that worked really well!!
Hi everyone. I'm chiming in with my moderator hat on. Please remain polite and address the topic at hand.
@PattyB is wondering what is so great about the XML DDR.
I love the XML DDR and use it all the time. The HTML DDR provides you with the same information as you find in the XML DDR, so you're not missing anything as far as the content is concerned.
The big difference between the two is that any HTML document is like a baked cake. It's ready for consumption. The XML representation is like a box that contains flour, eggs, etc. It provides all the materials you need to bake a cake. The reason we love it so is that you can decide what you want the cake to look like, taste like and whether you are cooking in muffin trays or the big 26" tin.
Iām liking this topic enough that I think tomorrowās office hours will likely focus (barring specific user questions, which always get priority) on the analysis advantages to using something other than the HTML DDR. Most of my discussions have primarily focused on FMPerception vs other tools, or FMPerception vs no tools... but I donāt know that Iāve ever explicitly tackled FMPerception vs the HTML DDR (aside from as a side note). Most of the time, when someone is looking at FMPerception, itās because theyāve already decided that HTML DDR is not meeting their needs. But tackling the topic from the perspective of someone who likes the HTML DDR sounds like a lot of fun.
Itāll give us a little structure in talking about the kinds of deeper analysis that are possible. Canāt wait!
We don't typically record the office hours since we want it to be a free-for all place for people to ask questions and discuss.
It would be up to Dave and the attendees. Maybe Dave and I can do a podcast episode about the topic he talks about in the office hours.
As Jeremy said, we generally donāt record. Weāre sometimes looking at DDRs from user systems and other potentially sensitive things of that nature.
What I would recommend is trying to attend a future office hours, and saying āhiā when you get there. We can cover some of the same material.
I'll keeping pushing @jeremyb and @DaveRamsey to team up on some videos. From what I can tell, @DaveRamsey has about 900 hours of content that he needs to get out of his head. LOL
I'm a bit late (been head down for a few days), but I'd like to add:
I'm a new user of FMPerception/FMComparison. I had procrastinated on getting it, but the inclusion of FMComparison made it such that I could no longer put it off. I've been using them for 17 days now and to me it's FREE software. I'm working on two particular projects for which the two utilities have saved me enough time that I feel rather silly for putting it off. FMComparision has been huge for me.
And @DaveRamsey is very responsive and a pleasure to interact with.
If you're working in FMP regularly and developing/supporting systems/solutions which are going through changes or should be, these tools are a tremendous time saver.
P.S. I didn't want to upgrade to FMP v19 yet (as I can't use it comfortably in production yet), but I did so just so I could start using FMComparison. A $600 day (with the Engage discount on FMPerception) and worth every penny. YMMV
Coming pretty late to this party I just wanted to add my own experiences:
I used the HTML DDR for like 15 years and it worked pretty well for me. The search function in Safari did the trick. It worked, because my solution consisted of 18 different files, each of them having its own HTML Site.
But when I rolled my old 18 files solution into a 3 files solution, HTML just became not usable anymore, because a single HTML Document (with like 90 MB or so) just was too big to handle in a browser ā in terms of size as well as in terms of length.
I'm using FMPerception ever since and found a lot of things to fix, that I couldn't possibly have found in a HMTL DDR.
putting in some more thoughts, although being late too
I used CrossCheck from version 2 up till lately. It is a great analyser I prefered to BaseElements and even FMPerception ( I only evaluated it in V1). What I liked was getting everything presented in FM again and with the Master Version being able to do my own layouts, reports and analysis which saved weeks of work in inherited solution (and of course in mine too). Armin form CrossSolution was very responsive and helped tracking faulty details in my solutions
All the same I bought FMPerception with Claris Engage conditions because it is always uptodate and in sync with the Claris/FileMaker versions. I think I will have to get accustomned to a new tool. What I love is the speed and the fast drilldown to get to the root of my mismanagements...
one more thing: FMPerception is a stand-alone application, not filemaker nor filemaker runtime.. makes it even easier
The main reason to use FMPerception exclusively now, is its speed and its handling (Yes, support is also another point). A quite big solution took about 2 hrs for generating the analysis with some of the other products at the time when we used those
I had a MacMini dedecated to CrossCheck because an analysis of a 48-file solution with more than 6GB of XML took up to 16 hours, even with 16GB of RAM, Quadcore i7 and fast SSD.
Speed was gained when FM deleted metadata about mediafiles in layouts from the DDR, the last version with this information (vital to some of my inherited solution analysis) was 13.0.9 if I remember correctly. I did extra runs of DDRs with FM13 even when already developing in FM16 because of the loss of datadepth. CrossCheck was by the way the only tool to deal with this info about mediastreams, size, position etc. of images used as buttons or backgrounds in layouts.
@harvest: Very cool about CrossCheck. I didnāt know that there had ever been a tool that did anything of substance with the media information (before it went away). FMPerception did not release until FileMaker 15, so I missed that window.
Youāll be pleased to hear (if you have not already) that the Save as XML output does contain media information again. FMComparison has started working with this data, and Iām really looking forward to doing lots more with it.
(Caveat: FMComparison currently only displays the images and related metadata on themes and the file icon. Layout object comparison is one of my outstanding tasks before I can release an official 1.0... but the data is there for me to work with. Iām excited.)
wow, great to hear, makes me really curious
I didn't know and/or was to lazy to really dive into the dirty FM-XMLs lately, I love what you achieved with your tool and I suppose I have no idea about the effort/sweat/tears it took...
Thank you so much, it makes our products better and far more stable.
If you are interested in hearing some of the journey, I highly recommend listening to Joe and Dave talk about their projects. It has humor, tech jargon, and insights into the projects.
