jmci

A client has asked me to design a custom CRM system for his company to replace a legacy system. This client has some familiarity with FileMaker Pro. In initial discussions he is hot on the idea of using table view instead of list view layouts. I've been a contract developer using FileMaker for many years and have never employed table view in a project I've delivered to another company. I know that table view has evolved somewhat recently and I'm interested in hearing the community's opinion of the advisability of using table view instead of list view and the reasons pro and con. If it's as bad an idea as I believe it to be I want to be able to present a compelling argument, if not, I need to be convinced by professionals.

OK, let's hold that technique in reserve You seem to be able to add more than one y-axis field. Could that be the solution?

I've been struggling with something and I don't even know if it's possible to accomplish it in FileMaker. A client has acquired data from the Medicare about outpatient surgical procedures that have taken place over the last several years. The data is available in one table that contains many fields but there are three fields of interest: Year: the year in which the surgical procedure took place Payment Amount: the amount paid for the procedure Facility Type: the type of facility at which the facility took place (there are four possibilities) I've also created a summary field called sPaymentAmount My client wants me to provide a line graph of this data with the Year field along the horizontal (x) axis and the Payment Amount along the vertical (y) axis. That's easy enough. I've done that before. The wrinkle is that he wants to see a separate line in the same line graph showing summary Payment Amount data for each of the four Facility types. Can FileMaker do that? What's the trick? Do I have to have the chart in a particular sub-summary part?

Yes I do.

I'm working on my first data separation model project and it has an Invoice table. There is also a related Payment table. The Invoice table has a calculation field that sums the Payment::Amount field in related records. It also has a Balance calculation field that subtracts Invoice::SumPayments from Invoice::Total. In the user interface file I've created an Invoice form layout on which I've placed a portal to an occurrence of the Payment table. Rather than the user entering payments directly into this portal the user clicks a button above the portal that runs a script that opens a window containing a layout in which the user enters the new Payment record. I've done this lots of times before and it always works well but in this project I'm experiencing some anomalous behavior. Whenever the New Payment script completes, the Payment record doesn't appear in the portal until I click on the Invoice layout. Also the SumPayments and Balance fields don't recalculate until I click on the Invoice layout. Similar behavior occurs when I delete a Payment. What's happening here? What's the solution?

Is there a way to allow a senior employee or middle-manager to assign new accounts, to existing privilege sets, without granting that person full access privileges?

Can anybody explain why the conditional formatting formula evaluates as false or can't be evaluated while the control has focus?

Hi Raybaudi Actually I didn't really have a problem understanding 1 as the conditional formatting formula. True is always true and that's easy enough to understand. What I don't understand is why the conditional formatting formula evaluates as false or can't be evaluated while the control has focus. jmci

I've seen FileMaker apps designed by others where the fill color of an object on the layout changes as the user enters that object. For example, as the user tabs from one editbox control to another on a layout, the fill color of the current object changes from white (the apparent default color) to yellow. I always thought that technique was cool and wanted to know how to accomplish it. I've recently had an opportunity to look at a file which used that technique. In layout mode I saw that all of the editbox controls on a layout had a default fill color of yellow and each of these controls had the same conditional formatting specified. Based upon the conditional formatting formula the fill color was changed to white. The formula was simply the number 1. I tried it on one of my projects and it works very well. My problem is that I don't understand how it was accomplished. What's going on with that conditional formatting formula?

That's an interesting choice. Now, back to my problem... I reasoned-out the cause of the problem by myself. The OnLayoutEnter trigger of the Splash Screen layout must have fired when the file first opened but, since I had already assigned my Startup script to run at file open, the triggered script couldn't execute until the Startup script had finished. Of course by that time the Startup script had already navigated to the Home layout but the triggered script still went ahead and installed the menu set that belonged to the Splash Screen layout. To test this theory I un-checked the OnLayoutEnter trigger from the Splash Screen script. I then modified my Layout_Navigate script to install the custom menu set for the Splash Screen script whenever a user explicitly navigated to the Splash Screen (About) layout. I then closed and re-opened the file and the Home layout appeared with its proper menu set in place. Problem solved and I've learned a little more than I knew before about the OnLayoutEnter script trigger.

Several of my layouts have two menu sets. One is used when the file is in development mode and contains menus and options that are not included in the menu set that gets installed when not in development mode. My Splash Screen layout is one of those with two possible menu sets. The Splash Screen layout also serves as an About layout and when the user navigates to that layout I want to present the user with a minimum of menu options. On the other hand, when in development mode, I want many of those menu options available to me. What I can't understand is how the OnLayoutEnter trigger of the splash screen layout could execute a script after my startup script had already navigated away from that layout to the Home layout several steps before the Exit Script step.

My File Close script navigates to a splash screen layout. The OnLayoutEnter triggered-script for this layout installs a menu set with almost no options. When the file opens, the splash screen layout is the current layout (as intended) and my Startup script pauses for two seconds, does several other things, then navigates to my Home layout. The OnLayoutEnter triggered-script for the Home layout installs a menu set with many more menus and options and all is well. The problem is that immediately after program execution exits from the Startup script, the OnLayoutEnter triggered-script for the splash screen layout executes and installs the stripped-down menu set. What causes that script to execute?

That's what I wanted. I knew that enforcing RI at the interface level wouldn't be good enough in every situation.

OK, I see it. That would work. Thanks Now, would that enforce my referential integrity delete rule in all circumstances such as if the file was accessed by another external file?

Forgive my inexperience but what do you mean by the "calc for the RLA"?