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Inspector is the latest solution analysis tool from FMNexus in the person of Vince Menanno. The About screen touts itself a “comprehensive diagnostic, debugging and documenting tool for FileMaker Professionals”. In our recent testing we have found this claim to be accurate.

History

Inspector grew from a previous product Vince created which was Analyzer. Analyzer was, we believe, the first tool of this kind to document the fields, layouts, scripts, relationships, value lists and security settings of a FileMaker database. Analyzer could do it even before FileMaker Pro could do it. For many developers over the years, Analyzer has been the tool of choice.

What You’ll Need

Getting your data into Inspector requires creating a Database Design Report (DDR) in XML mode using FileMaker Pro 8 Advanced. After creating the DDR, you will create a solution record in Inspector then import the DDR into an Analysis record. It’s possible to store many analyses per solution and many solutions within the Inspector database. Before importing the DDR into Inspector, you’ll want to decide whether to turn on ‘check references and dependencies’. Turning it on will increase the time to process the DDR and for a large solution it could take hours. You may want to consider turning this option on for only one analysis and use it to track down where a field is referenced within the solution for instance.

FileMaker 8 Ready

Inspector is fully FileMaker Pro 8 aware and in fact you’ll depend on many features that only FileMaker Pro 8 will give you. Inspector itself is a FileMaker Pro 8 runtime so you can run it locally on your computer at the same time you have your regular copy of FileMaker Pro open. This makes it very convenient for fixing bugs as you can flip between Inspector and FileMaker Pro. Inspector also works best using the DDR of FileMaker Pro 8 Advanced as it is more comprehensive than the DDR produced by FileMaker Developer 7.

Four Key Functions

There are 4 distinct areas of Inspector:

• the actual Inspector window where you can examine all the different elements of any of the files/tables in your solution;
• comparisons where you can compare different analyses of a solution;
• a comprehensive Search screen where you can build and store searches of your metadata;
• and the Security Spotlight that will help you to analyze your solution’s security from the point of view of a privilege set.

Inspector Window

This is where most of the action is. The Inspector window allows you to choose which file to look at and then which area to examine. In the screen shot above, we’re looking at the Activity file and examining layouts. A list of the file’s layouts is shown on the left and a portal of layout objects is shown on the right. The layout objects can be filtered using a filter field above the portal; the portal list can also be sorted by many of its headings. One of the FileMaker Pro 8 features used extensively in Inspector is tooltips. As you can see in the screen shot, a trouble dot is located beside a field. Hovering over the dot exposes the trouble (in this case a value list assigned to the field is missing). The orange ‘i’ icon above the portal will display another window with more details about the highlighted object. Unfortunately it doesn’t always include the problem information too.

With references and dependencies turned on when the DDR is imported, there can be quite a bit of information in the layout references and dependencies sections. All items listed here can be hot-linked to their respective section of the Inspector window. A convenient Back button is provided in the top left corner of the screen so you can instantly return to a previous view.

Comparisons

This feature has the capability of being very handy. Unfortunately in our testing for writing this article, the solution we tested with was over 30 files and quite complex. We ran the comparison report but it took almost 24 hours to generate and resulted in a 9300 page report! We decided to compare two relatively small files with only a few changes and try that out. This was much better and only took about 10 minutes to compile (although it still resulted in about 112 pages). The printed report is verbose and generous with white space but that makes it easy to read; you’ll likely find that printing it is not desirable unless you’ve narrowed your search to a specific area and only have to print a few pages. You’ll want to make sure you understand that when you pick the two analyses to be compared, you want to select the “compare this” as the newer analysis and the “to this” as the older one.

As you can see from the screen shot above, even indexing changes in fields are reported as well as changes to the next serial value of a field.

Searchlight

Inspector does a great job of searching your solution and can store previously used searches. You start by determining the scope of your search. That is done by selecting the solution, analysis and database(s) stored within Inspector and shown in the top part of the search window.

The bottom part of the window is where you set your search criteria or select a previously stored search. In the shot above, we created a new search called “[Search]: set sel” which finds all script steps whose name is “Set Selection”. Another search parameter could be entered as long as it is searching Script Steps. For instance, restrict the search to only include those steps whose field’s base table matches a specified string. The results of a search can either be produced as a report in Preview mode or as a hotlink window in browse mode that can link you to that element in the Inspector window. The variations of searches and the detail you can specify are truly unique and powerful.

Security Spotlight

Think of Inspector’s Security Spotlight as FileMaker Pro 6′s Overview function. You can select a solution, an analysis, a database and finally a privilege set and then see at a glance the security access on records, layouts scripts and value lists. In a large solution with many privilege sets, this offers a huge timesaver when troubleshooting your security settings.

Inspection Results

Inspector has some great features and offers a huge advantage over just using FileMaker Pro’s DDR report. Some other great features that are offered on almost every screen are filtered portals, sortable portal columns and the choice between two screen sizes for those who have big monitors (1024×768 or 1920×1200). Download a free demo for yourself and give it a try. You’ll find it at www.fmnexus.com.
Steve Hearn

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