A talented colleague is looking at moving to Servoy, and the need is strong right now because of a project they already have in-house. She has asked about the FMP-to-Servoy converter … I remember hearing about one. IMO, especially when moving from FMP 6, there is not much to salvage, really, from an FMP solution; it’s far more desirable to rewrite, I believe, for optimal use of a SQL back-end, and to make good use of Servoy’s events (and all the other huge “plusses” vis-a-vis whatever already existed in FMP).
Is such a converter available? If so, where? And what my friend really needs is anecdotal reports from people who have tried using it to convert a fairly large FMP <=6 solution … did it work well? Did it save time?
You have to contact Servoy for that.
I have let them convert 2 FMPro solutions (FMPro 5/6) for me to Servoy.
The conversion works fine, but the result might not be what you expect from a Servoy solution.
Just because they sorta look alike they are in fact totally different beasts in how to set things up.
For example all scripts you use in FMPro are per file. After conversion you have them per form. So if you have 1 FMPro script that you use on 50 layouts you have now 50 copies of that method in Servoy.
And then there is the issue of the FMPro tricks used to get things done. They are converted 1 on 1.
So in that case it’s garbage in, garbage out.
So you can convert FMPro solutions to Servoy with this but you tend to be doing a lot of cleaning up after that.
In both my cases I ended up doing a rewrite from scratch because this was easier in the end.
Now for converting a small, clean (no tricks) solution I don’t really see a problem. For the bigger ones I suggest you do a rewrite and use the fm|port bean for drag and drop over the layouts.
ROCLASI:
You have to contact Servoy for that.
I have let them convert 2 FMPro solutions (FMPro 5/6) for me to Servoy.
The conversion works fine, but the result might not be what you expect from a Servoy solution.
Just because they sorta look alike they are in fact totally different beasts in how to set things up.
Oh, absolutely! And the colleagues considering the switch are aware of that. Especially since rebuilding an FMP 6 solution in FMP 8 already entails a complete rethinking and serious recoding, IMO “now’s the time to become a Switcher”. Developing in Servoy is so much quicker, and there is no expensive-yet-unscalable server product to purchase, and very soon … NO RECODING TO TAKE THE SOLUTION TO THE WEB.
The problem had been wanting to recreate the FMP layouts, on which very extensive work had been done, in the rewrite. With the upcoming FM converter from J. Salerno this seems to become a non-issue.
I have used fm|port and it does what it says on the tin. I found though that after the import, I did a lot of cleaning up work because it looked…
like filemaker.
It is useful for print forms which duplicate 1 to 1
David Workman was demoing his plugin for doing data transfer between fmp and servoy at ServoyWorld.
There is a product called fmp2sql which will recreate all your tables in any sql from a filemaker solution. For some reason their site appears down now (http://www.fmp2sql.com/)