I have a field into which a user may enter free flowing text. I'd like to be able to give the user a real time indicator as to how many characters have been input thus far. I currently have a script which calculates the count but it requires the user to trigger said script by clicking a button. Is there any way to do this without the user having to exit the text input field? Thanks!

FileMaker Version: 6

Platform: Windows XP

You can make a looping script with a short pause:

Loop

Set Field [ FieldLength, Length ( MyText) ]

Pause/Resume Script [0:00:01]

End Loop

Trigger the script when you navigate to the layout, and make sure to add Halt Script options on navigation buttons that leave the layout, so it won't keep looping.

Thanks! That works great. The problem I'm having now is to get the looping script to stop. My navigation buttons actually involve scripts and not just going to a different layout. When I place a "Halt Script" step at the beginning of that navigation action, it halts the subsequent script as well. I've tried an "exit loop if" based on a field value but even when that field value changes, the script continues on. I've also tried getting it to exit based on a getstatus(LayoutName) function. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Don't put the Halt Script in the navigation scipts, choose Halt Script as a button option in the button definition box on each button on the screen.

Exit Script works too, but in nested scripts, only the last sub-script will be exited.

One more thing... This is working but with one bothersome exception: At the moment the script is pausing and resuming, user input is interrupted and results in skipped characters. I've tried different time intervals for the pause/resume, but with unsatisfactory results.

Is there any other way to accomplish this?

Change the FieldLength field to a Global.