It's not me, it's you. My relationship with the FileMaker Relationship Graph

It was 1997, FileMaker Pro 4 had just been released and all was good in the world. We now had a plugin API and I was about to have access to a plethora of new external functions.

As much as the plugin API was great I still lay awake at night, dreaming of a graphical representation of the relationships between my databases (tables). It would help other developers understand the structure of my solutions and provide me with a snazzy diagram to include in my system documentation for clients.

Fast forward to 2004 and the Relationship Graph was born. This is fantastic! I can create relationships by dragging and dropping lines, colour code relationships based on my own criteria and my system documentation now contains a detailed ER diagram that is generated automatically from FileMaker.

Fast forward to 2010 and my relationship with the Relationship Graph has soured. While I still appreciate the graphical representation of relationships between tables it is time consuming and frustrating to work with. Where did it all go wrong?

The scenario
I regularly work on solutions that have upwards of 50 tables. These tables are often defined in a single FileMaker file which has relationships defined using the anchor buoy method. As I'm working away I find something isn't working quite as I expected so I need to check on the criteria defined for a relationship. Perhaps I've made a typo, selected the wrong operator - whatever the cause, I need to locate the relationship Projects_Contacts_ProjectID

The problem
I open the Relationship Graph and am greeted by a small text block on the screen that provides me with a road map to where particular table occurrence groups are located on my graph. This is a hack I've developed to try and alleviate the problem of locating a relationship. I can start navigating to a particular region of the graph or I can attempt to set a world speed typing record and jump to the correct relationship.

I decide to start typing.

I type Proj and jump to the first Table Occurrence that starts with the word Projects. At least I'm in the right neighbourhood! I also use colours to distinguish between key tables so I look for the Contacts table colour (dark blue) and find a couple of relationships which I then scan through until I locate the relevant relationship.

Now this doesn't sound too bad but this is the best possible scenario as it's a solution that I've developed and I control the layout of the Relationship Graph . Heaven help me if I open the Relationship Graph to be greeted by a plate of Spaghetti served up by another developer!

Even if I've been dedicated and kept my Relationship Graph clean there is still the potential for things to go wrong. If someone changes the sort order of fields on the Manage > Database > Fields dialog this also affects the order of fields on the Relationship Graph. If the graph was initially set-up using "View By: field name" and it's now being viewed by Creation Order, the lines between Table Occurrence now intersect. If another developer decides to "do me a favour" and clean up the various crossed lines, this arrangement is saved with the graph. Switching back to the fieldname order I'm now greeted with another mass of scrambled lines.














ABOVE: Just a small small section of the Relationship graph for a complex FileMaker solution. I can zoom out and see the entire graph on a pin head or zoom in and only see 1% of the defined relationships. Like finding a TO in a TO stack?

Possible Solution
At its most simple I just want an interface to locate and edit a relationship quickly. I'd even be happy with the old Define Relationship dialog box. I understand that in some cases relationships are based on multiple fields so you can't display the left and right side fieldnames, that's fine. Just let me get to a relationship based on relationship name, check the configuration and make the changes as required.

What about the display on the relationship graph? Won't this change the appearance of objects on the relationship graph? Yeah probably, and I'm not sure exactly how this should be handled.

What I do know is this.

The year is 2010. I've just received a shiny new copy of FileMaker v11 and I'm spending too long trying to find specific relationships on the FileMaker Relationship Graph. So much so that I'm now dreaming of an interface that was found in a FileMaker version released 10 years ago.

Can someone at FileMaker Inc. please do something about the relationship graph?