Working with a Claris Studio data source (Claris Pro only)

A Claris Studio data source lets a Claris Pro file access data from external Claris Studio tables (each table corresponds to a view in Claris Studio). You can view and update Claris Studio tables interactively in the relationships graph in much the same way you view and update Claris tables.

When you create a file with Claris Pro, the following are added to the file:

your team's Claris Studio data source (only if you are a team manager in the current team)
a "shadow" table that links to each Claris Studio table
a table occurrence in the relationships graph for each Claris Studio table
a layout based on each Claris Studio table occurrence
a "shadow" value list that links to the option list for each Claris Studio field that supports one

If a Claris Studio data source isn't present in the file—for example, in files converted from FileMaker Pro—or if you need to add a table for a recently created Claris Studio view, you can add the data source and add a table in the relationships graph.

Setting up a Claris Studio table in the relationships graph

You can work with Claris Studio tables in the relationships graph and on layouts as you would with other Claris tables. You can retrieve, add, update, and delete data in the Claris Studio table interactively, in real time.

Choose File menu > Manage > Database.
In the Relationships tab in the Manage Database dialog box, click .
In the Specify Table dialog box, for Data Source, choose Claris Studio Data Source.

If a Claris Studio data source isn't present, choose Add Claris Studio Data Source (this option is available only to team managers in the current team).

You see a list of the external tables for the Claris Studio data source.
Select the table you want and click OK.

The external table appears in the relationships graph. The table name appears in italics. For information on linking to and working with tables in the relationships graph, see Working with the relationships graph.

To identify whether a table in the relationships graph is a Claris table or from a Claris Studio data source, move the pointer over the arrow in the table header. You might want to add a color to Claris Studio tables in order to identify them more easily.

After you add a table to the relationships graph, Claris Pro adds a layout with that table name to the Layout pop-up menu and the table is listed in the Tables tab. The table name appears in italics.

Fields from the Claris Studio table appear in the Fields tab. The field names appear in italics. You can remove fields if you don't want Claris Pro to display them within your custom app. These fields are not removed from the table schema of the Claris Studio data source. They're removed only from the Claris Pro representation of that table’s schema. To add fields that were added in Claris Studio, you can synchronize the field schema. See Updating data between Claris and Claris Studio data sources (Claris Pro only).

Limitations on working with Claris Studio data sources

You cannot change the schema of tables in a Claris Studio data source. However, you can add supplemental fields to do calculations and summaries on data from Claris Studio tables.

All Claris Studio field types are supported, except attachment, and correspond to the following Claris Pro field types:

Claris Studio field type	Claris Pro field type
short text	text
long text	text
number	number
drop-down	text
checkboxes	text
single choice	text
date	date
time	time
timestamp	timestamp
phone	text
address	text (for each subfield)

In the Fields tab of the Manage Database dialog box, field options are not supported.