Vince Menanno, principal of Waves in Motion, wants to make it easier for FileMaker developers to make changes to projects with hundreds or even thousands of elements. And that’s why his firm has developed a new “lite” version of Analyzer, a development tool for analyzing FileMaker Pro projects.
Analyzer Lite lets you save element comments between analyses; it sports more comprehensive cross-referencing; provides faster analysis; and offers the ability to export the analysis as HTML, according to Menanno.
“Sure, with a new project you have the time to organize everything from scratch,” he said in a press announcement. “But all too often I find myself called in to fix someone else’s project. Things are all over the place and there’s no documentation, or it’s a database that’s been worked on by too many different people.”
Saying that he became frustrated with FileMaker’s “limited” development tools, Mennano and Waves in Motion have overhauled Analyzer, which automatically documents and cross-references the elements (fields, layouts, relationships, value lists, scripts, etc.) of a FileMaker project. Analyzer Lite was created to “introduce a whole new audience to hassle-free FileMaker development,” Menanno said.
Analyzer Lite can be used to generate summarized or detailed project reports. For example, the detailed report for a particular field contains a list of all the layouts that include the field and every relationship that references the field. Analyzer indicates the type for each field, if a field is indexed or not, and the number of repetitions for each field.
And with all this information gathered together, cross-referenced, and formatted in a series of straightforward layouts, Analyzer Lite is also the “perfect tool” for documenting your projects, according to Menanno. You can add comments anywhere in the project database generated by the Analyzer or export the information you need into your own reports, in plain text for printing or HTML for online documentation.
What’s more, Analyzer Lite 3.0 is free and supports both the Mac and Windows platforms. You can download it at the Waves in Motion Web site.