Developer Assistant v3.0 – it’s worth it..

Have you ever used a FileMaker development tool from Dracoventions?  I have: I’ve been using their developer tool (now called Developer Assistant) for several years.  It provides not often used functionality, but when you need it, it saves a lot of time and hassle.

Developer Assistant V3.0 has plenty of new features:

  • Ability to search in multi-line text boxes in almost any FileMaker dialog (as described above)
  • Supports FileMaker 14’s new Script Workspace.
  • Largely rewritten internally for faster searches and future expandability.
  • You can now find a previous match instead of just a next match.
  • Option to match “Contains”, “Starts With”, “Ends With”, or “Whole Words”.
  • Option to toggle if the search window remains always on top of other windows.
  • Find disabled script steps and more by optionally searching in the underlying XML that represents each script step.
  • Default script search is now performed on a translation of the XML representing each of FM’s 167 unique script steps into a string that matches exactly what you see in the script editor. The search also includes metadata from the XML that’s not visible in the script editor. The previous Developer Assistant only performed minimal translation of XML before searching which made it difficult to search for anything too long or complicated.
  • Default script search now includes the name of the script along with the script steps.
  • Option to display the exact text that was searched, making it easy to come up with additional searches for more specific XML or hidden metadata that you don’t see in the script editor.

And don’t forget For full time developers, this is a great time saver.

Don’t just take my word for it.  Daniel Wood, of Digital Fusion, recently reviewed Developer Assistant v3.0 is his 14 for 14 series.

Daniel goes into detail to explain ways to save time and hassle, including a section on searching the relationship graph:

Relationship Graph Searching

Previous versions of the Developer Assistant have allowed you to search the graph but this was somewhat limited. It relied on you entering the entire TO name if you wanted to go direct to a table occurrence, otherwise it worked much like the normal search on the graph where you have to cycle through matches.

With Developer Assistant 3.0 introducing a list of search results, we can essentially produce a list of all of our table occurrences for easy selection of any TO on the graph – perfect for large relationship graphs or legacy solutions where you are tasked with untangling a spiders web!

If you’ve ever had to decipher someone else’s relationship graph, you know how valuable this is.  Follow the link for the whole article.

Source: 14 for 14: Developer Assistant v3.0 Review

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