Hello FM community, 

I'm VERY new to FileMaker and i have a daunting task i put upon myself. I know what i want to see but i dont know how to get there in the end. Well i have some ideas but its not working so i thought i'd ask for help.

I'm building an employee check-in/out system for our front desk and i have the basic GUI designed, and i've tried about 20 iterations of coding this thing to work the way i want to but i'm so lost. What i want to do is to be able to have a pull-down list of employee names and tie them to 2 buttons a check-in button and a check-out button. Once you select an employee and a check-in/out button there will be a tab thats called STATUS and will have a green or red indicator next to that employees name showing them being in or out. 

Problem:  I have a 3-person test pull-down; I don't know how to tie Employee A to the Check-in or out button and then to a status indicator. So far what i've done is create a 3-field table, an auto-ID field, an Employee name field and an in/out field. My idea was to make it simple and have the check-in button put a "1" in the corresponding row/cell for that employee name, then to have the status indicator for that person read that cell and make the indicator green for "1" and red for "2". now it works for the first person in the list but i can't make it work for any one else down the list, it just continues to change the first employees status indicator. 

 

Any suggestions or tips on how to make this work? once i get a good working idea on how to get the back-end table and the pull-down/button/indicator script working I'm off and running! i appreciate any help i can get! thanks in advance!

Is this on the right track?

CheckInOut.fmp12

Wow, thats pretty cool; yeah thats on the right track alright! of course it opens about a million questions, but yours looks very uncomplicated, like less so than i was thinking. I was thinking i would have to do a lot of "if, then" statements for buttons and stuff like that in the back-end to select users and tie them to a button and an indicator. 

 

ok here's what i got going on so far, i think im still stuck. 

Checksys.fmp12

Hi Adrian

I tweaked your file to give it the functionality you are after.

One way of doing it is to have a table of 'Staff', and that need to be related in some way to your 'Menu' table with the global where you select staff names.

Have a look for the following in the enclosed file :-

New Staff Table

Two relationships from the 'Menu' table to that staff table. One that matches whatever you have selected in the global popup menu, and one that shows all staff (using a cartesian join)

Changed your value list to show the list of all staff in the staff table

Added a new script that toggles whether a staff member is in or out

Replaced your two buttons with one, that changes it's meaning, text and colour depending on whether the chosen staff member is in or out

Added a portal to your 'Status' tab to show all staff and their current status.

Hope it helps move you along!

Checksys.fmp12

wow thats amazing! thats exactly what i wanted!

Is there a way to make the status portal page two-column to show more employees? 

Hi Adrian

You can't have two column portals I'm afraid, and it would be fairly complex to achieve that. I would suggest working with the single column, and just add a vertical scroll bar to the portal, and make each row smaller.

You could duplicate the portal and do something crude like filter the first portal to show only people who's surname begins A-M, and the second portal to show N-Z.

I've enclosed an example of that.

Checksys.fmp12

On 23 March, 2017 at 5:01 PM, AdrianM said:

Is there a way to make the status portal page two-column to show more employees? 

Yes, this is quite simple in FileMaker you just make as many columns you'd like across on the layout and change the inital row for column; as pr image below, not sure about its dynamics though...

Edited March 29, 20178 yr by ggt667
removed IIRC, added image.

Ah yes, nice one ggt667, had forgotten about that little cheeky option. Probably better than my idea.