Hi listers,

this may have been covered before but in the short time that I have been on here I haven

Save yourself time and grief and get one of these dialog plugins: www.troi.com or www.24USoftware.com

Either one will substantially enhance FM limited capabilities.

Steve

This is a bug in FileMaker. FileMaker denies this is a bug, claiming this is intended functionality. Under that guise, they refuse to fix it (oh, sorry, they refuse to change the intended functionality).

BY THE WAY -- note that clicking the "Esc" key on your keyboard triggers the default button. So a user that wants to cancel the dialog by clicking Esc will actually submit the changes in the dialog.

I think this is ridiculous. I'm irritated with FileMaker for not acknowledging that this is a crippling factor for accepting input through the custom dialog box. Please relay your frustration to FileMaker using the following form:

http://www.filemaker.com/company/product_problems.html

If enough people tell FileMaker the Esc key should not trigger the default button, which MUST be the "accept" or "continue" button and not the "cancel" button, then FileMaker will hopefully fix this problem.

I've used the 24USoftware and it's great (haven't tried Troi's). And, yes, FileMaker can be WAY annoying when it comes to obvious glitches/problems they they insist are "features".

Anyway, short of a plugin, you might try making three global fields. Then, in your scripts, manually set the fields that should/should not be changed depending on the value in status(currentmessagechoice).

Jeff

Steve, thanks for the advice on the dialog plug-ins, both of them will solve this problem - and many more! I am evaluating Troi's at the moment, while they look very useful I'm not sure about committing to them if you want to sell your product to a very limited number of organisations...

Mariano, thanks for the info about FileMakers 'feature' - I have hit them with the problem using the form...

I had a play with the ESC 'feature' you talked about and could not raise it! The AllowUserAbort is off by default, but even after I enabled it using a script step before the dialog call I could not get the dialog box to exit using the escape key - interestingly the escape key works on a normal message box, later on in the script!

I am using FM Pro 6.0v1

Hi, thanks for the reply but am not sure what you mean about the global fields. Do you mean the buttons?

The text input fields that I have are already global fields, they don't have to be, as they are only used to solicit info off the user before going on to validate it and other processes. The problem is that the information in these fields, ie what the user has put in while the dialog is present, is only committed to the field if the user pressed the default button to exit the dialog box. If either of the other two buttons are pressed then the info that was entered is discarded and the previous value (if any) remains in the editable field. - not good :-(

I've been beating my head on this problem all morning! I finally figured out that only the default button enters data, and then I came here to find that--yep--it's a bug (oh, excuse me, *feature*).

Next time I'll remember to come look here first, rather than beat my head on the wall.

Thanks for the help, all.

Carlisle

By the way, what I was trying to do was use a custom dialog to drive a find, with the buttons triggering perform find, add another request, and cancel. No go, of course.

My solution was to remove the "add request" button and retain the"find" and "cancel" buttons, and then after the perform find introduce a "Do you want to find another record" message. Yes modifies the find, adds a request and loops, while no returns to browse mode and quits.

Not as elegant, but it works fine.

(You can always run this via a layout, too, but I was trying to use the Custom Dialog function this time.)

some time after in FMWorld

the only way I found "arround it" is....making sure that default coice is "cancel-exit script"

the only issue is ...u loose the ablity to have 3 "real inputs"

this is the 5 th time I wrote to FM as I get mad each time I try implement dialog boxes.....the root of user interaction

the only thing is ...I am affraid that FM.com has a little email filter on their support:

IF FORM source "product_problems.html" SEND TO TRASH

:X