FileMaker Pro to 4th Dimension Quickstart Guide

Introduction

This guide is intended for FileMaker Pro developers who are considering adding 4th Dimension as an additional development environment. The purpose of this document is to help familiarize FileMaker Pro developers with 4th Dimension so that they can get up and running as quickly as possible.

The environments that a developer works in are like tools in a tool belt. You already use FileMaker Pro because it is a very versatile tool for the applications you are currently using or building. But there are several reasons why you might consider adding a new tool to your tool belt.

For one thing, FileMaker Pro can be a relatively inflexible environment in which to work. While there may certainly be several ways to accomplish any given task, they all rely upon the same basic tools used in various combinations. With FileMaker Pro, developers rely heavily upon relationships and specialized calculation fields to perform basic navigation and display functions. Sometimes, the required functions are so complex that they are simply too much for FileMaker Pro to perform.

Another area where people feel limited by FileMaker Pro is performance, especially in areas like sorting records and summarizing data. Oftentimes, reporting functions are handled off-line because they take so long to calculate and print.

Security is another very important area where developers often want more than what FileMaker Pro provides. When discussing security, there are really two separate issues at play. First, there's the security of the data within the database. But there is also the security of the database design itself, which constitutes your intellectual property. If the database is vulnerable to unauthorized access at either level, it can be devastating.

Finally, one area where providers of both custom solutions as well as shrink-wrapped products feel the limitations of FileMaker Pro is the area of deploying and updating existing solutions. Because FileMaker Pro combines both the data and the schema (the field and script definitions, and the layouts) in a single file, updating an existing solution with a new version is a time consuming and problematic task. It often involves importing the data from the old version into clones of the files, a potentially dangerous task that can result in loss of data.

You have probably already run into these limitations of FileMaker Pro, and may already be considering the addition of a new tool to your tool belt. You need a cross-platform tool that is flexible, powerful and fast.