Genral Filemaker design question

[TWillson]

Is it good design to seperate the user interface from the data in filemaker. This was the case in Access and allowed you to make changes to the UI without have to do imports/exports. At first I did not think this was possible, but as I learn more about scripts, portals, constants and globals I see this is very possible. Are there any implications with seperating the two in a multiuser environment?

Thanks,

Tom

[LiveOak]

There are implications, not particularly due to a multi-user environment. Some things are hard or impossible to due with a single interface file displaying data from other files (tables). One is printed reports. Since the use of portal on reports is problematic, many printing layouts remain in these other files. The second is list views. List views are often more convenient than portals. The single file interface design must make due with portals and filtering to eliminate list views.

I think it is too early in the use of this design approach to say that only single file interface solutions are "good" design. IMHO, this design technique still has too many compromises for many situations.

-bd