Table comments in FileMaker
Recently someone asked about comments for a table and whether we could do something there. In the FileMaker community you find a couple of ideas around this topic, so we through why not. Let us add a comment text for the table definition section of the manage database dialog.
But we run into a couple of questions like where to store comments. Should the plugin store them somewhere or should FileMaker store them. Would we have some kind of user interface to enter the comment?
We can't just store comments in a local preferences file since others would open the database file and miss the comments. We can't store them in a new separate table as that would not survive clone and migration process. We decided to leverage the existing field comments in FileMaker to define a new field _TableComment to store it. Just define a field (can be global) and add a comment there. FileMaker stores the comment and provides the user interface to enter it.
Now that we can define such a field, we can add it to each database:
Since we have the table comment in the field name, we can still see it on Windows in the field list. For macOS we can let the plugin display the comment below the table name. Currently with the font we get three lines of text there.
Please try the feature. It is included in version 14.5pr1 for macOS. Please let us know what you think, whether you use the feature and whether you have ideas for improvements. We hope the various database inspection tools could pick up this idea and it becomes a kind of standard until Claris adds a table comment feature.