Philosophy

The diff tool in FMPerception looked at each edited property as a “change”. Unfortunately, this produced an excessively detailed report that was difficult to understand without dumping the data into something like FileMaker in order to isolate the kinds of changes you were most concerned about. Too many trees, not enough forest.

FMComparison looks at a FileMaker element (field, table, script, layout, etc) as the core unit of change. Any changed properties in an element will cause the element to be flagged as edited. Once you click on it, it itemizes the changes to just that element. Additionally, the ordering of elements relative to each other is isolated into special Organization categories, allowing us to isolate element changes specific to those made to that element itself. If changes to the order of scripts or layouts are not relevant to your process, you never have to look at them.

Whenever possible, FMComparison will use the UUID that Claris has added to the XML to associate elements across versions. However, when that leaves elements unlinked, FMComparison will fall back to element names and FileMaker IDs. In certain cases, depending upon your process, this might result in two completely independent elements being associated, appearing as a single edited element rather than one deleted element and one created element. Nine times out of ten, this will occur when the items have matching FileMaker IDs. Note that when this occurs, all the properties of both elements will still be available in the details display.

FMComparison is intended as companion tool to FMPerception. There are currently no plans to sell it independently of FMPerception.

Welcome to the birth of the FMPerception Suite!