Card window and beyond

June 9, 20178 yr

Newbies

The possibility of being able to use card windows as reusable objects throughout multiple layouts in FileMaker 16 is an useful concept. For example, if you have recurring popovers in many layouts with the same content you could substitute these with a card window layout and have the content controlled from one place instead of using duplicate content in multiple popovers. A one-to-many relation so to speak.

One obstacle in achieving full flexibility with card windows is its minimum size. This seems to be a fact:

- macOS 10.12.5, FileMaker Pro Avanced 16.0.1 minimum size: 144 px height, 110 px width.
- iOS 10.3.2, FileMaker Go 16.0.1 minimum size: 60 px height, 60 px width.

These limitations makes it impossible to substitute our 40 x 40 px popovers into a card window, which is a pity.

Also, could it be that the card window feature is the first step towards "global layouts” where the content/the objects of one layout can appear on and be a part of other layouts as static objects, like one menu object over many layouts? This could dramatically lower the redundancy of layout objects throughout a solution - I guess it would correspond to the basic idea of non-redundancy relational databases.