It’s been a while in beta, but we have a new version of BaseElements out as final today. BaseElements 17 is the latest version of our award winning analysis tool for FileMaker solutions. As well as adding support for the cool new FileMaker 17 features, it also includes some new functionality of it’s own. For all the details, check out our release notes, but here are some of the highlights :
New Clip Manager
Copying something that you want to keep for later, like a custom function you use a lot, or a script you’re going to need later? Just switch over to BaseElements and hit Command-V for paste. Doesn’t matter what layout you’re on or what you’re doing, as long as you’re not in a field inside BE, it will go into our new Clip Manager.
You can keep any type of FileMaker compatible copy paste content in there. And best of all, it’s independent of which version or copy of the BaseElements files you’re using. The Clips file is stored in the Application Support folder, so is accessible by every copy of BaseElements, regardless of location.
You can rename your clips, and paste them out of BaseElements and into your solution at any time.
Server Side Imports
Tired of waiting for an import to complete and want to keep working? Get the import started in a hosted copy of BaseElements and you can choose the option to import server side instead, keeping your machine and your copy of BaseElements free to do other things.
Use your own Tags to document your solution
FileMaker has a few places where you can use comments, some in fixed places like a field comment, and others more general, like commenting inside a calculation text block. Now you can use these places to your advantage to document your solutions. Using the format of :
@TAGNAME {option name} comment text
you can include whatever tag details you need and then link to those tagged items directly. Tags appear highlighted in their location, and are included as a solution wide list for easy searching.
We helpfully used a fairly well documented example, that is in use in FileMaker already, so I’d suggest reading up on them in the fmdocs help page.
And lots more…
- We’ve included a really handy extra import table of step state, so you can do something like search for every step that has “AllowFolderCreation” turned on for example.
- We’ve added more code to show details of the new plugin script steps, so you can see exactly what we know from the DDR if you’re using new plugin script steps.
- There’s layouts and a privilege set for accessing your BaseElements data via RESTfm or the Data API. Meaning you can re-use this data wherever you want.
- You can turn off Alerts ( errors, warnings or performance issues ) if there are superfluous alerts that you don’t need to see, and don’t want coming up in the totals.
- A new change report diff engine with much clearer differences between elements so you can easily highlight changes between versions.
Of course there’s more, lots more. Check out the Version History page on our support site and download the new version today.
Upgrade Pricing
If you purchased BaseElements 16 a month before the release of FileMaker 17 ( April 15, 2018 ) you will receive a complimentary update to BaseElements 17. If you have an annual licence you automatically get the new version and can download it at any time and start working.
If you have BaseElements 16 or earlier, there is upgrade pricing available on the buy now page. But for anyone who is using BaseElements regularly we highly recommend going to the annual model. It’s cheaper than yearly upgrades and means you have access to the latest version at any time.