Situation: In my layout I have a nicely sized portal with a number of fields inside, each field has some space around it for legibility sake.

Problem: When someone clicks on the row without clicking inside one of the fields, the whole row turns black to indicate it is selected. Similarly, if I change the fill color of the portal to a dark color (it is currently white) a lighter contrasting color will appear.

Question: Can anyone suggest a more refined way to handle this, for instance a lighter gray on a white background. Or is this built in and unchangable?

I believe the answer is:

Go to layout mode

Highlight your portal part

Select Format / Portal

Choose Alternate background color with ...and select the color / background pattern you desire.

You could put a colored rectangle behind the portal.

If you want to avoid the user selecting a portal row without clicking into a field define the portal as a button performing the step

Exit record

(Not sure I fully understood the problem though)

thanks for the help, I appreciate it.

For the sake of clarity (and because i found an old post asking the same question but it never got answered) I'm going to try to explain why I'm going with the third suggestion.

The first suggestion draws alternating colors for each row of the portal, what I am looking for is control over the highlight (contrast) color that indicates a portal row is selected.

The second suggestion changes the color, but i am still limited by the contrast so I would have to use a rather dark color as the background of the portal and I think this would impact the legibility too much. (just my opinion here, but this is mostly a question of design anyway.)

The third suggestion works better than anything else I've been able to come up with on my own and except for the "blink/flash" that occurs when clicking it is pretty unobtrusive. I'm going to think about attaching this "dummy" button to a script that actually does something valuable to the portal row as a way to make the flash make sense, but as it is it gets rid of the contrasting selection color and for that I am happy.

Thanks, I get a lot out of these boards and I hope someone else will get something out of this thread.

Just a little follow-up, I updated one of my clients yesterday with the "portal as button" solution and found that Filemaker for Windows handles this slightly differently than the Macintosh client.

On Windows, the contrast color (Black in this case) still appears, but only for the top portal row. All the additional portal rows handle the button as expected, and actually a little better than the Macintosh, they don't show the "flash" of triggering a button.

It's a curious inconsistency, but ... whatever.