Having Greyed Out fields come live

[grant]

Is there any way (short of moving to a new layout) to have fields become active (they are grey beforehand), once a field is chosen or a condition met ?

[Vaughan]

It depends on what you mean by "become active." Giving a field a background that changes from grey to another colour isn't at all hard, but it's not really doing anything other than changing the appearance either.

If you want to actually allow or disallow entry into a field (in a robust and reliable way) then you're either going to have to use some sort of field-level validation or switch layouts. Validation will allow users to enter data but FMP will reject it when they exit the record or change fields. Switching layouts will probably give the best result, but it'll require substantial interface design to make it work: you will have to control record browsing and switch layouts on a per-record basis, so you'll probably have to get rid of FMP's default status area and build an alternative.

[-Queue-]

The portal visibility technique is another option. It might require some extra initial tweaking, but you won't need any extra layouts or major interface overhauls.

[Greg M]

One possible solution is to make this field disallow user entry. Then create a script that will test whether or not the user should be able to access the field or not, and set that field to run the script when clicked. For instance, this one tests based on the password they used to access the file.

If ["Status(CurrentGroups)="Restricted Users""]

Exit Script

End If

Go to Field ["Field Name"]

This would block any user who logged in with a password belonging to the Restricted Users group from editing what is in that field. But a user who logged in with a password belonging to the Admin group would be able to then edit the field, even though in your layout it was defined as uneditable This kind of thing could be used in conjunction with a script that defines the background color of the field to create grayed-out fields that would prohibit user entry when certain conditions aren't met. If you do this, remember to take this field out of the tab order.

-Greg

[Greg M]

I realize that my example could have easily been done using Filemaker's bulit-in security. But you get the idea - the conditional If statement can be used to meet your needs.