

Read Kevin’s post on this topic here: Live Development + “New Record”.

Fields set to Auto-enter Serial numbers are used all the time and for many different reasons. As our discussion continued, the recurring theme was “ Is there anything more we can do in these cases”? Danny then shared an idea he had been introduced to by Kevin Frank that I’d not heard before that a contributing factor to FileMaker locking a table had to do with how FileMaker manages fields that auto-enter a serial number. The big question was how to (or could we) protect data integrity when making schema changes? The more obvious choice is to ensure that your scripts check for and manage any errors they encounter, including errors encountered if a table is locked, but not all developers use such extensive error trapping. In a recent conversation, Danny Mack and I were discussing how to maintain data integrity for a highly complex application in which we knew that database administrators would be in Manage Database often. When making these changes, FileMaker will lock the table and prevent the creation of new records. If, like me, you have been developing and supporting FileMaker solutions for many years, and even if you’re newer to the platform, you have no doubt learned when (and when not) to make changes to schema for apps being used in production.
