Louisa

Hi, Have a look at the June 6 posting under Left Brain of "Phone Number Formatting". It will tell you how to do this.

Hi, I have a layout for printing with approximately 600 fields on it (the layout size is maxed out). Each field has a title and a note field. I would like it so that if the field is not filled out it, it's title and note will not print and the layout will shift up accordingly to save space and paper. Is such conditional sliding of objects possible? I've been told about sliding/printing but I don't think it will remove the field labels as well as the actual empty field. I've thought about making the entire thing one big merge field, but I'm not sure how that applies to field labels. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

Hi Brandon, I'm not sure how you could do this but you could have a script which executes upon opening the file which checks the machines IP Address and if that's not correct shuts the whole thing down. Cheers

I would like to be able to filter out records in a portal so that only records which fit a certain criteria appear. On a layout I need to have two portals displaying information from the same database. One portal needs to display records with a creation date prior to a given date (this is not fixed like today's date or something like this but is determined by the user) and those which were created on that date. I'm not to sure how to do this. I've figured out how to display the ones which were created on that date by creating a global field which combines the master records ID with the date and relating the portal on this. Can I do something similar for the other portal? Thanks

hi, This may just be a simplistic response, but use brackets! Try it so that the comparison is date < ( // - 14 ). FMP seems to like brackets!

I figured this one out. Just turn off the border on the field under the Format menu.

Hi, You might try switching from a pop-up list to a pop-up menu. The menu is the length of the entire list without a scroll bar. Include the "Other..." option and the user will be able to enter values not in the menu. Good luck!

How can I get rid of the drop shadow on pop-up menus? They look ugly and a bit funny when they are in portals... I'd like it so they looked like normal fields. I don't want to use pop-up lists because I don't want the user to be able to enter anything but what is in the value list. Thanks

I've been trying to get the LayoutNames() design function to insert the layout names into a field. I've tried having a calculation field set to LayoutNames("MainDB"), I've tried setting a text field with a script using the Insert Calculated Value step, I've tried this with a global field... I can't seem to make it work. I'd like to have the list be inserted into a global field by a script... if this is possible how do I do it? I'm stumped!

Hi, I'm not sure if I can do this, but I've learned that if you can imagine it, there is generally a way to do it. What I would like to do is have a value list of layouts. The idea being that the user could choose a layout and go to it (via a script based on the number value of the layout). The list would only be some of the layouts in the database also the list would have to be self editing to grow or shrink as layouts are created. I thought of having a database which contains just the layout titles and a way of distinguishing which should belong to the value list, and then have a calculation field based on the content of the selected layout. Not sure if this makes any sense, but any help would be great. Thanks

Hi, This is going to need a script. I suggest a procedure something like this. User enters their first name and last name. These are then combined in a calculation field (Name) to be FirstLast. Then a search of the UserName field is searched. This will return all the UserNames which contain this combination. If there are no users with that name then the new UserName is Name, else it is Name and a number. The script would look something like this: Copy [Name] Enter Find Mode [] Paste [userName] Perform Find [] If (Status (CurrentFoundCount) = 0) Set [userName = Name] Else Set [userName = Name & (Status(CurrentFoundCount) +1)] End If Good luck!

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the most elegant solution but I'v ehad to resort to this sort of thing quite a few times and it does work! I suggest you do this using a script. Copy the information from the newestupdate field to the history field. In the paste step deselect the "Select entire field contents" this way the paste will appear after what is already in the field, not replace it. Then make the title for the history field a button for this script so that when it is clicked History is updated. As for the modifiedby and timestamp, create two calculation fields modifiedby and timestamp. Set modifiedby equal to Status (CurrentUserName) and set the timestamp equal to Status (CurrentTime), and voila more update info!

Hi, Sorry had a look at that and realized it wasn't very clear (weekend must be coming...). Anyway, PreviousReleaseNo, means the value held in the field ReleaseNo. on the previous record. To do this, every time a release record is created it's release number is posted to a global field (for our purposes, Scrap). The calculation then becomes: OrderNo & "-" & (Scrap +1) Hope this helps!

Hi, My suggestion is an auto-enter calculation of the sort: OrderNo & "-" & (PreviousReleaseNo +1) so that the result would be 10001-1 10001-2 etc.

ODBC = Open database connectivity What it does is it takes information from one database and translates it into a form that can be read by another database and sends it to that database. It makes a conduit from Access to Filemaker so that a user in Access can search and retrieve information from the FileMaker database but manipulate it in Access and vice versa. Does this kinda sound like what you want to happen?? Honestly though, I have no idea how good the connectivity is for older versions of FileMaker like 4.x. It's a relatively new integration into FileMaker, so you might want to look into this carefully before doing it. [This message has been edited by Louisa (edited July 21, 2000).]