What plugin version do you have installed? Are you sure?

We've recently migrated our in-house systems across to FileMaker 12 and are carrying out a thorough review of the new features available in the latest offering from FileMaker Inc.

One of the features we were excited about is the new Install Plug-In File script step. When combined with the get(InstalledFMPlugins) function it allows scripting of a process that checks that plugins are installed and provides a mechanism to install the plugin on the local machine (if not installed or incorrect version)

From our own experience this sounds great as we've had plenty of issues where plugin were not installed, older version were installed or end-users had difficulty in locating where the plugins should go.

Unfortunatetly, the quality of information reported by the get(InstalledFMPlugins) function makes it less useful than it might be. The issue arises from the version information returned.

The help documentation describes the Purpose as follows:

Returns the name, version number (if available), and enabled state of installed plug-ins

The main hint is that the version number is returned, if available. Further clarification is provided in the description section of the help documentation

Get(InstalledFMPlugins) returns plug-in version information only when plug-in developers have entered version information in the resource file (Windows) or the info.plist file (Mac OS).

Looking at the information returned from the plugins we've got installed there are significant differences between the reported version on both Mac and Windows.

This obviously comes back to the information specified by the developer when coding and compiling their plugin. Given that there doesn't seem to be consistency between development companies (or even plugins from the same developer) we'll continue to use the version checking function unique to each plugin.

We've always found this to accurately report the version of the plugin installed.