The old fmcollective

Roll-your-own Edit Mode

The Problem

You really like FileMaker's edit-in-place field behavior. Just place a field on a layout and it works in browse mode and in find mode without additional code. It is a beautiful thing but the seemingly random, accidental edits by your users is driving you nuts.

This is a recipe for rolling your own "Edit Mode" feature using the power of global variables in FileMaker 8 or higher. Note: this article in intended to be a quick-start guide, do not rely on this technique to secure your database.

Simplicity and Software Architecture

I'm always a bit behind the times so it was only recently that I found out that DevCon would be returning to the JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando. I actually miss the Arizona setting. Sure, it's hot in AZ but it's a dry heat. Orlando is just as hot with the humidity but it does have better food going for it. While both cities suffer from a severe case of sprawl, there is something about the Sonoran desert that is seductive to me. Walking through the desert brush makes me more aware of life and the scale of it. It's my personal Total Perspective Vortex.

Post-Design Caucus Meditations

Albert and the gang at SmallCo host the FM Design Caucus on the first Thursday of the month where a group of developers get together to look at design issues using FMP. Luckily when it was my turn in November they went easy on me.

Object-Influenced Design & FileMaker Pro

If you didn't get a chance to see Corn Walker's DevCon presentation this year, you've missed out on an important foray into a topic close to my heart, Object Oriented (influenced) design and FileMaker Pro. Corn really gets into the "how". I am simply going to introduce the main concepts below. Hopefully I can persuade him to extend this discussion with a treatise of his own after he has put with his treehouse-building adventures behind.

First, when I talk about object-orientation, I am speaking of a way to think about your database application from a design perspective. This isn't primarily about how you write scripts or "program" in FileMaker Pro. Rather, object orientation is the starting point of good application design.

Portal row locking "detail" pop-up window

Reprint of a post from May, 2004 before the days of FileMaker 8.x. Might still be a useful reference.

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I ran into an odd problem while working on my project management application in FileMaker 7. In one of my views, I have a portal in which the fields are enterable and editable "inline". You'll see in my picture that I have included a button that pops up a small detail window that shows users more details about that portal row and allows them to edit and add additional data to that portal row.

The crux of the problem is this. If you are "sitting" in a field in a portal row and then click the button (the blue plus sign) which does a "GTRR" (go to related record) of displaying it in a new, smaller window, you'll run into a record lock that prevents you from editing the record in the detail view because the lock from the referring window hasn't been released. If, however, we release that lock by committing the record BEFORE we do our GTRR, we'll lose the focused portal row and wind up going to the wrong related record (actually, always the first related record).

Solution
The idea is to be able to commit our record but still return to our portal row before doing our GTRR script. This is where script parameters come to our rescue. Pass the Get ( PortalRowNumber ) function as script parameter with that button. We can now safely commit the record, return to the portal row by the value of the script parameter and happily do our GTRR.