Hello,

My company has decided to recycle the excellent FileMaker solution we have created for one of our projects for use on another similar project. (We are a publishing company and we use FM to handle invoicing, ad tracking, proofing, collections, etc). However, I have to make several changes to our Invoice layouts, issue names, and so on, enough that I think the best way to do it is to make a seperate version of the same database using FileMaker Developer (to rename the files from the current solution) and FileMaker Pro to save new cloned copies of the files. I then reset all of the serial-value numeric fields across all of the files in our solution (all 45 of them!) and now I want to change the user interface so that it is noticably different from the other version of our solution. A new colour scheme is probably the best way I can think of to do it.

There are hundreds of layouts with a lot of coloured backgrounds, buttons, and other layout elements. I expect that it will be an extremely tedious and time consuming job to manually edit all of the layouts to change to a new colour theme. Is there any utility out there that can automate this for me, or is there a way to do it using FileMaker's built-in functionality?

FileMaker Version: Dev 6

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

Hi generica.

Can't think of any tool that would automate this for you, and even if there were I would be skeptical about using it (the user interface is one of the most imporant parts of a database.) My best advice is to work out your layout styles, and then systematically go through the files to update the layouts.

short answer:

if you had planned for layout change, it would be just a click away ...

long answer:

when planning a database, use container fields for buttons and background colors. The graphics should reside in your main file and pulled from there by calculations. Best if you do the same with field labels, then translating the user interface is very easy

calc for Button =case theme="blue", main:bluebutton,..

calc for label text= case language="french",main::french, ..

I'd be concerned about using the container approach because of speed issues on a WAN.