FM Expression Editor – for syntax highlighting

Recently REALEvolution, a FileMaker and Internet solutions shop operating out of Australia, announced the release of FM Expression Editor, an application built in Adobe AIR (the same app that TweetDeck’s built in, for a little context).

If you’ve ever wished for a little syntax highlighting, intelligent function lookups and autocomplete inside the calculation dialog, this product is worth exploring, since that’s exactly what it purports to do – albeit outside the FileMaker app itself.

And it works as advertised!  There are a few quibbles I have with it generally, listed below, but basically they’re in the class of low-grade kvetching about a product which

a. is FREE (with a rather frequent ad popup) or cheap ($19 and the popup goes away)

b. provides something we’ve asked for in FileMaker calc dialogs for awhile.  We may yet get that in future FileMaker revs, but in the meantime, this is a great little tool.

Here’s a screenshot:

Here are the minor quibbles (stress on the word “minor”):

• For autocompletion of fields defined in schema, you need to load a DDR.  Since that’s a snapshot of the database, it’s not like you can define a field here, and then refer to it in the next calc, and so on.  You’re working with static schema information.
• There’s no context provided for the calculation – so it’s rather like the calc dialog invoked when scripting, where context can’t be predicted by the script editor, rather than the calc dialog in the Manage Database UI.
• There’s also no built in validator to check for well formed caculations, valid field references, etc.

I was going to complain about the loss of the View As: dropdown for the Function List, but since they’ve added a very convenient Search filter that updates as you type, this is actually an improvement!

In summary:

Overall this is a valuable, well thought out tool. Definitely worth having handy in your toolkit, especially for longer calcs with lots of nested functions.  I still very much hope for native syntax highlighting functionality in FileMaker, but in the meantime, I’ll take this, thank you.  Give it a whirl.