Newbie: Create New Field in tab ?

[St3v1e]

Good afternoon/evening,

I have found a script which looks similar to the functionality I'd like to embed into a tab in my database, but it's not "quite" functioning correctly.

What I'm hoping to achieve is to have a field I can enter comments into, and then a button which when pressed, creates a new field. The idea is to keep every comment in a seperate field for ease of reference later. 

Pressing the button "New Comment" also creates the date to the left-hand side (would be nice to also add the current time), and also the "Delete Field" button to the right.

This is the script I discovered - but as you'll understand (better than I do), it doesn't create a new field, but does create a new record each time.

# save the current customer ID
Set Variable [ $customer ID ; Value: Dashboard::ID # ]

# Go to Communication Log tab and Create New Record
Go to Layout ["Dashboard" (Dashboard) ; Animation: None ]
New Record/Request

# Set Field to enter the comment into
Set Field By Name [ Comments::NewComment ; ]

# Go back to my original staring point
Go to Layout [ original layout ; Animation: None ]

 

Any guidance to modify the existing script would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

 

 

[comment]

2 hours ago, St3v1e said:

a button which when pressed, creates a new field.

That is not possible. Fields cannot be created programmatically. Nor would you want to have it that way: just imagine what it would take to find a comment in a cluster of fields of unknown size. 

The correct approach is to create a new record in a related table for each comment. And there you can easily have another field for the creation timestamp (or separate fields for date and time, if you prefer).

 

[St3v1e]

Many thanks comment, I'll have a think about this and try to implement it as per your instructions.

[St3v1e]

I'm not really understanding this situation but I do get the idea of creating a new record and not a new field - thanks for outlining that.

However, I've created a relationship between 4 tables referencing 4 tabs in my layout - Contacts, Tab2, Tab3 & Comments. "Contacts" is the primary key, and all the others are linked back as ForeignKey's.

When the "New Comment" button is set to activate the script (which I now have working), I do indeed get a new record appear in the portal, but that's my "apparent" issue - every time I click "New Comment" it triggers a new record. 

I'm guessing it's to do with my layout referencing all 4 tables - and suspect that the "New Comment" button/record needs to show in another layout which only references the Comments table?

File attached.

 

Note Buyers Database (Rolodex) Updates copy.fmp12

[comment]

A few notes, in no particular order:

Your layout shows records from the Comments table (and your portal show records from the current found set in the Comments table). That makes no sense. The layout needs to show records from the Contacts table (which you named ContactNames, for some reason), and the portal needs to show records from Comments.

You have the relationship between ContactNames and Comments defined to allow creation of records in Comments. That means you can create a new comments simply by typing into a field in the last (first empty) portal row and Filemaker will automatically make it related to the currently viewed contact. Since your script doesn't do anything other than create a new empty record, I don't see why you need it at all. A new empty portal row will always be there anyway.

In case you do want to use a script, you need to grab the contact's primary key in a variable, go to a layout of Comments, create a new record, set its foreign key to Contacts field to the variable, and come back to the original layout (the layout of Contacts with the portal to Comments).

Note that Set Field [ SomeTable::Somefield ], with no content specified, doesn't do anything (except generate an error).

 

Edited August 28, 2020 by comment

[St3v1e]

Hi Comment,

Many thanks for the detailed reply - plenty of excellent guidelines there. 

Apologies also for the delay in getting back to you, but things have been very busy at work and I'm struggling to find a few hours here and there to work on this - however, this weekend is free so I'm hoping to put your advice into practice and get back to you if I have any further questions.

Thanks

[St3v1e]

Hi Comment, thanks for your help, spent the weekend trying to figure this out and think Im  90% there.

I'm sure I'll be back with more questions as this DB takes shape.

Appreciate your help and guidance.