Portals have come a long way in Filemaker Go. With just a bit of thought though, we can make them even better.

You may have noticed that if you try and scroll beyond the content in iOS that you reveal a cross hatch pattern that appears to be in the background.

Website scrolling in iOS

Filemaker Go even mimics this behavior in some circumstances. If you resize a layout to be smaller than the screen by pinching, or if you scroll past the content in list view you will notice this same pattern.

Portals are different though. If you scroll past the content in a portal it will show the color of whichever object is behind it, or the layout body color if no object is behind it. To fix this we just need to add an image filled box underneath the portal and make sure that the portal fill is not transparent.

Image fill with a tile repeat

Once you have placed your image filled box directly behind your portal you can enter browse mode and test it out. If everything worked correctly you should see the same effect as we got earlier scrolling beyond our content in Safari.

End result in a FileMaker Portal

With one extra layout object we have added quite a bit of polish to our portals. It will also add consistency that will add a level of professionalism to your solution.

You can actually find the background pattern in Lion and Mountain Lion. If you don’t want to go digging through your system resources though, I have attached it here.- Tanner

Checkout more FileMaker Go Best Practices.

Source