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Navigation | ISO FileMaker Magazine
New Launch Center window for opening files Launch Center window — Open local and remote FileMaker Pro solutions, convert other files, and manage favorite files and hosts all in one place. Solution icon — Choose a predefined icon or provide your own icon to represent your solution in the Launch Center window. Improved layout design tools and controls Improved button labels — Define buttons to have a text label, an icon, or both. Choose from predefined icons or use your own.
Button bars — Define button bars to group and format buttons and popover buttons uniformly. Add a text label, an icon, or both for each button or popover button.
You can assign actions — a single command or a script — for each button to perform. Placeholder text in fields — Display a label or instructions within a field until you enter data or search criteria. Layout parts for navigation — Add a navigation part to the top and bottom of a layout to help you easily build navigation for your solution.
Improved color palette — Add or change custom colors, set specific color values, and enter or paste hexadecimal values. The palette includes colors that coordinate with the predefined themes. Define Hover and Pressed states for portal rows. Apply the same style to all tab panels in a tab control — Specify that tabs share a single style when creating or modifying tab controls.
No problem! FileMaker 16’s new Card Windows have opened the flood gates for all kinds of new methods for presenting information. Not least of which are your common dialogs and wizards. But, what about using them for navigation? Why not? In fact, you’ll find so many benefits from using a Card Window, for the purpose of navigation, you may think it makes little sense to use anything else. Especially, when you want the navigation to both hide and reveal as needed. In this video, we walk through a wonderful technique of using a Card Window for the purpose of sidebar navigation.
Not only does it blend in well with the user interface but it retains which menus were collapsed and which were expanded. It works in both Form view and List view. Overall, it’s one of the best methods you can choose for solution navigation if you’re using FileMaker 16 or later. In the context of FileMaker Pro, a good example of this is your basic button.
There never was a FileMaker Pro without the button widget. Enter FileMaker 14 and Button Bars and we now have a lot of possible options. Especially when you combine the Hide object calc which arrived in FileMaker You can control which segments are shown and take advantage of this is various other ways. In this video, I show you how to make a few minor tweaks to a default Button Bar object in order to streamline one of the available FileMaker templates.
You get all the same results with some added benefits provided by the Button Bar layout widget. As software users become more and more familiar with various UX methods, it becomes more and more desirable to emulate those methods within your FileMaker solutions. Common patterns such as tab panels and scrolling lists are a piece of cake and native to FileMaker.
Some of the more recent implementations are simple and super easy, like Popovers for example. However, other implementations can be a bit complex and require those ever necessary bits of deep knowledge about how FileMaker works behind the scenes. When you open a database, you see one or more windows on your screen. If you open the People database that you downloaded at the beginning of this chapter, you see one database window.
If your database has only one open window, the Close Window command closes the whole database. But you can open more than one window into a single database Viewing a Table , and if you do, you need to close each window individually to close the file. Top: The Launch Center gives you quick access to frequently used files.
To close all the windows in all the databases you currently have open, simply press Alt Windows or Option Mac and then click the File menu. On a Mac, the Close command is replaced by Close All. Choose it, and FileMaker closes all its windows, which also saves and closes all your open databases. Whether your database contains information about individual people, eBay auctions, products you sell, student grades, or whatever, FileMaker always thinks of that information in individual chunks called records.
Each record contains everything the database knows about that person, auction, product, or student. For example, each person in a database of magazine subscribers gets her own record. For instance, in your saltshaker collection database, you may not know the year a particular shaker was manufactured, so you can leave that field blank.
To enter information in any field in a record, just click it and then type. What to type? As Figure shows, most fields in this database have a label at left indicating the type of information the field contains. A label is just a bit of text that appears near a field. See the box on The Many Faces of a Field for more on recognizing fields and labels. When you click in a field, dotted borders indicate the fields you can edit. Fields always appear inside the content area, but other than that, they can have amazing variety.
You can let your creative urges go wild. A field can have a label next to, below, above—even inside—where you enter data, or no label at all. You can color in a field with a solid color, a gradient, or a picture. You can make borders thick or thin. You can even give them rounded corners, so rounded that they look like little pills.
In fact, if mystery is your thing, then you can make your field invisible—no label, no border, and no color. See Chapter 4 for more detail on customizing and beautifying the fields in your database. Efficient data entry means typing something in a field and then moving right along to the next field. You can use the mouse to click the next field, but using the Tab key is faster:. Press the Tab key to move to the next field. Press Shift-Tab to move to the previous field. Who decides which field is next or previous?
You do. When you design a database, you get to set the tab order. For example, when people move, you can change their address data. Just click in the field to be updated, select the data, and start typing the new information.
Just revert the record, and you can be confident that whatever you did has been forgotten. One of the easiest ways to commit a record is to simply click some empty space not in a field in the content area. FileMaker dutifully saves the record for you.
If you want a little more control, visit Layout Setup to learn how you can set FileMaker to ask for confirmation before committing a record.
This process is called committing the record. In that respect, a FileMaker record is like a cardboard file folder—you have to open it before you can change something inside it. You can be in only one record at any given moment, and that record is said to be active.
Believe it or not, getting this terminology straight will make things easier later on. While no two people are alike, it may not always seem that way from their contact information. For instance, if you want to include three people from the same household in your database, the data in the Address, City, State, Zip, and probably Last Name fields will all be the same for each person.
FileMaker copies everything from the first record into a new one for you. FileMaker Pro gives you three commands that let you delete one record, a group of records, or even all the records in your database. Consider saving a backup copy of your file first Saving a Copy of Your Database. One record. Multiple records. FileMaker has a helpful command that trashes any group of records of your choosing.
Before you use this command, you have to tell FileMaker which records to delete. You do that with the Find command Finding Records. Again, FileMaker gives you a chance to change your mind with a message box that tells you how many records you have in your found set and asks you to click either the Delete All or the Cancel button.
All records. In some cases, you may want to delete all the records in a database. Maybe a colleague wants an empty copy of your database for his own use. But if you just want an empty copy of your database, cloning is easier; see Saving a Clone of Your Database.
Once you get used to deleting records, you may get tired of FileMaker nagging you about being sure you want to delete. FileMaker fields can hold a lot of text. To see for yourself, in the People database, click in the Notes field. When you do, a scroll bar appears at the right side of the field.
If you type lots of notes, then you can scroll through them. When you design a database, you get to decide which fields have scroll bars, as discussed on Scroll Bars. As you type, FileMaker just makes the field grow to hold whatever you type.
When you leave the field, it shrinks back to its normal size, hiding anything that goes outside the edges. You can enter text into a field in all the usual ways, like typing on your keyboard or pasting text you copied from another field or another program. That second scroll bar you see right next to the Notes field lets you see if there are lots of notes for a record. But what about Duplicate Record? Fortunately, you can add the Duplicate button to your toolbar.
The top section of the dialog box shows all the buttons you can add to the toolbar. On a Mac, the middle section gives you a pristine copy of the default toolbar that you can drag into place to put things back to normal.
FileMaker is just trying to keep you informed so you can make good choices. So you sometimes see dialog boxes that FileMaker calls error messages. Unlike the Delete warning, you only get once choice: to click OK. Just remember that you must be viewing an actual record and have your cursor in a field before you can start typing.
And take that book off your keyboard, eh? In this dialog box, FileMaker asks you to tell it where to put all that data your wpm typing power is delivering. Until you click in a field, your information has nowhere to go. But first, you need to learn how to navigate through the records in the database. The Status toolbar gives you several tools that help you get where you need to go. As you go through this section on navigating, it helps to have a database open in front of you so you can follow along and try some of these techniques.
In the People database, or indeed any FileMaker database, you can add as many records as you want. To tell FileMaker which record you want to look at, you have three options:. The arrow buttons let you flip from record to record one at a time.
Pretend your database is a number line, and each record is numbered. To get to the next record, click the right arrow. To go back, click the left arrow. In addition to displaying the controls for switching records, the Status toolbar indicates where you are in the database. And the pie chart tool tells you that your current found set is showing 8 of the 27 total records in the database.
The slider is kind of a turbocharged version of the arrow buttons. Instead of clicking once for each record, you can advance through a bunch of records by dragging the slider. The slider is most handy when you want to get to the beginning or the end of a database. In that case, just drag the slider as far as it will go in either direction. The Current Record indicator above the slider serves two purposes.
Second, if you know which record you want to be on, then you can simply type the record number to jump to it. Beside the Current Record, the Found Set display shows you how many records you have in your database. A vertical button bar, though not as list-ready as a portal, can be made to support vertical cycling through a list of values. The visible segment name can be a calculated result, so it can change dynamically in response to user clicks with a little help from the Refresh Object script step.
Now, this is a bit of a hack, trying to get a button bar to behave like a portal, which gives us vertical scrolling for free. But consider what we get for free in exchange: native search and navigation. A button bar can keep up with these state changes without much effort or overhead. This mockup leverages a single button bar object and a single, relatively simple script. No relationships, no extra fields. Button bars and buttons and popover buttons also support a new layout resource called glyphs.
A glyph is an icon associated with a layout object that can be paired with text positioned in a variety of ways or can stand on its own. FileMaker comes with a basic assortment of glyphs. Unlike layering an icon on top of the button bar object, when glyphs are built in, they move and slide appropriately as the dimensions of the button bar change. Also, they respond to mouse events e.
So hovering over the text of the segment will cause not only the text to light up, but also the icon. This creates a consistent user experience.
Filemaker pro 14 navigation bar free
With that action menu example, you might be a bit suspicious. Functionally, yes; and you could probably come up with a lot ways to tackle the problem. But button bars will thrive in this functional space. So no pixel-perfect resizing or opportunity for error on your part.
And button bars support a rich suite of style aspects including distinct aspects for the entire object, the dividers between segments, the segments, and an icon , making it easy to change various cosmetic attributes and have changes apply to each segment consistently. Getting back to navigation, I had a solution years ago that supported a diverse user base.
Each privilege needed access to a subset of layouts, and each privilege needed to see their unique subset of navigational options in a different order, to better represent their own workflow. At the time, I solved this by using a repeating global field that would load a distinct set of visible options and underlying targets for each user, based on their privilege. I now know there are better ways I could have done this even then, but now I could just use a button bar.
Each segment of a button bar supports conditional visibility. If a segment qualifies to be hidden e. With a little bit of trickiness I can even get the buttons to appear in a different order for each privilege note the position of Layout 2 for the two privileges above. The user should be able to scroll through and search the list. This is a classic interface metaphor that we might tackle with one or more portals, or perhaps with some repeating fields to simulate the list component, with some additional heavy lifting for the search feature.
The example file is definitely unlocked, I’ve just had another check of it. Once you open it in FileMaker, the status area is hidden, but you can easily show it again. This allows you to navigate the layouts, and enter find mode etc. All other options are unlocked, you can access the scripts, tables, fields, relationship graph and so on all in the usual manner. If you have any other questions let me know. Dear Sirs, I am trying to get beyond simple programming in FileMaker 16 but cannot seem to find any way of doing this.
When I read your article I was impressed but could not really understand it. So I downloaded the example file thinking it would be unlocked and I could try and get a grip on the calculations and scripts. I don’t see the point of locking this example. Yours sincerely,Barry PS: I am a retired senior and for me this is just a hobby to help keep me from going senile. Active segement is not working, have included the object name on each of the segments but nothing is being highlighted.
But theres a big Bug or Feature? In other words: if you have a long and a short label you can only stretch the whole button bar. The result is crab and unusable ’cause every button has the same length. As jonro said: “Typical of FileMaker to give us half of what we need.
Is there a way to have the icons change the same way? Rather and manually assigning the icons do you have a way to automatically load an icon for the button bar? I’m new to Filemaker and developing. At the top where you choose the component of the object you want to style you can change this to Button:Icon or in this case Button Bar:Icon. Then you can set its colour using the fill colour for the various states. If you add your own SVG icons then you must ensure the SVG has no fill colour data in it, otherwise you cannot change the colour via styles in FileMaker.
Obviously some knowledge of SVG’s is required to follow that document, but if you want to get started with some custom svg’s that can be styled try www. How are you coloring the icons. There may be a way to partially get around the icon limitation. The individual segments of the button bar can be hidden with the “Hide Object When” option in the Inspector.
So, it’s possible to display buttons 1, 3, and 5 on one layout and buttons 2, 4 and 6 on another. This could be abstracted in a couple of different ways.
This would give us different icons and different buttons on each layout, but they would still be in numeric order,.
Typical of FileMaker to give us half of what we need. I’ve been using a button bar with repeating fields, too, and it does everything I need, including icon, text and script abstraction.
I’m going to evaluate the button bar with an open mind; I really would like it to be a viable solution, especially because it is designed to work well with WebDirect and FM Go. Thanks for the article. So why consider the button bar? OS X: The version information may not be updated until the next time you log in or restart.
You must restart your computer before using the software. If the update does not complete successfully, try the following: Create backup copies of any files you saved in the FileMaker Pro 14 or FileMaker Pro 14 Advanced application folder. Run the updater program again.
Was this answer helpful? If you swap out lines 30 and 32 and re-run the Load Nav Script it will appear to have worked but the minute you close the file and then re-open it then the second tier does not show. I have spent a couple of hours with the dubugger but had no luck spotting the problem. I have a solution with over layouts and it needs new nav put through and I really like this concept but I cannot rename the layouts so am hoping to use the alternative of setting names and using the exceptions.
Thank you for replying. I am sure this is a busy time for you. From what I can work out today there is a disconnect between the calculation for ActiveSegmentCalc on button bar where it is setting the.
Just have not worked out how to get around this when you are not using the actual layout names. Have to say this is pretty impressive. I was not even aware you could specify a calculation for Active Segment! Sorry that I cannot quite work this one through. Hi Mike, I have this working but am pretty sure there is a more elegant fix. So feels like although I have got this working there was probably a much better change that would have achieved the same thing. I look forward to hearing from you.
I really like the way the nav remembers what level you were on and am hoping to implement with a table that contains records with button label, navigation script to run and parameters to pass to nav script. I already had the table set up when trying to implement another nav solution but I like the tiers in your solution so am hoping to mash them. Thank you for sharing. S Fine if you want to delete any of my posts if they are taking up to much space on the page and swap them out for something more succinct!
Hi Katy, I will have look into it more, since my solution still relies on the layout name being set to match the variables being set, even if you put overrides in place.
Hi Mike, I have nearly finished implementing the new navigation in our solution. I hit a small but significant issue where all the go to related buttons in portals are currently single script steps and moving between layouts via these did not update the navigation tiers.
I have turned about 80 of them into Perform Scripts now but have at least that amount again to go. One thing I just need to query with you is if you know why [1] does not evaluate, all others do like [2], [3], [4] but not [1]? Is it something internal to FM that makes it not evaluate? I have learnt so much from your solution so thank you again for sharing. Hi Katy, Note sure I quite understand, but the main calculation that sets global variables is in the active button calculation on the top button bar.
You might also want to change the z order of those objects so the evaluate correctly top to bottom. I found that z order matters but also within the layout part, so header part at the top will evaluate first, then body and footer, for example. Does that help? No subscript designation is needed for [1]. This makes the variables sort out os order in the Data Viewer which only adds to the confusion. I have a card window used for navigating between layouts. Could you be of some help to me in solving the problem.
Thanking you for your support.
What’s new in FileMaker Pro 14 and FileMaker Pro 14 Advanced
Поиск занял больше времени, чем она рассчитывала. Мысли ее мешались: она тосковала по Дэвиду и страстно желала, чтобы Грег Хейл отправился домой. Но Хейл сидел на месте и помалкивал, поглощенный своим занятием.