Re: Please Recommend a Front End App

On May 12, 2005, at 7:44 PM, John DeSoi wrote:

>
> On May 12, 2005, at 7:06 PM, Kurt Gibson wrote:
>
>> One important solution I created in Filemaker Pro requires very
>> detailed and exact replication of official court forms with database
>> data entered on the forms. Imagine a form with small type, boxes and
>> spacing that must be exactly as on the official form and data from
>> the database on the form as printed to pdf. One nice thing about
>> Filemaker is that its reporting ability is very flexible.
>>
>> I also have an extensive solution with approx 50 tables/databases to
>> run my small business. I built a calendar, contacts, clients,
>> timelog, and billing solution. I have been bumping my head against
>> Filemaker Pro's 50 database limit for years - server would allow you
>> 125 databases for about $1000. For those of you with no experience
>> with Filemaker, a database is a table. Each file only has one table
>> and all layouts/reports/forms and scripts are in the same file. This
>> setup has pros and cons that are irrelevant now.
>
> I'm not familiar with FileMaker, but my understanding is that it can
> communicate with other databases via ODBC. Would it not be possible to
> keep your investment (at least for a while) in the front end forms and
> convert to PostgreSQL as the data store?
>

I have some colleagues who have tried to do this, but it seems that
this (at least in their hands) is a bit of pie-in-the-sky. I'd love to
hear otherwise, but I'm not sure this is a viable solution,
particularly using Filemaker 5, which is not truly relational.

Sean