We have a past of only doing personalized apps for clients. We currently are in a project of doing a truer vertical app of which we will only maintain one serie of versions instead of one fork per client. We still deploy one file per client, but we use Otto to mass migrate versions.
One of the biggest roadblock in doing this in FileMaker is entirely trusting the dev copy to do a direct dev-prod flow. I act as a dev lead on this project, and tried it in the past and it caused a lot of problems. No amount of review will make you catch every mistake that was done. It’s just too easy in low code to do something wrong, code is not verbose enough and I have a lot of training to do.
For the moment, the only thing I could imagine is filtering the final version by using a diff made by FMComparison (in conjunction of asking the devs to write what FM entities was touched by an added functionality) and bringing piece by piece in a prod-ready file that is used for Otto migrations.
This stabilized the releases a lot, but has its own problems : it opens the door to a new kind of mistake (omitting to bring something that was required), and most importantly, it excruciatingly long to do, and when I don’t necessarily have time to do it quickly, the devs often have nothing to do. I think both are more present in layout modifications. It’s very hard to understand what was changed, and I don’t want to delete all objects and copy paste all, as layouts is where devs make the most mistakes.
I feel discouraged by the project and that FileMaker is not very friendly to vertical products, but for the moment it’s what our team can do. I’m curious if the teams at Geist or anyone else lived this and if I’m missing something obvious, either to be able to trust the dev file, or a way to review faster and bring things faster in the filtered prod file.