Portal display issues amoung others.

[fmsavey]

I was excited to begin taking advantage of all the new features in FM7 so as soon as I recieved my copy I began to experiment. One of the first things I tried was to put fields inside a footer part when choosing view as a list and that seemed to work ok. Next I placed a portal with a scroll bar in the footer part and the portal data displayed fine until you tried to scroll the data to view the remaining related records. As you scrolled the screen either repeated the last record or was filled in with black. I've also noticed that objects placed in a layout that were drawn with the layout tools displayed intermittently when switching between layouts. Sometimes they appeared, other times they did not. Finally, when I attempted to print to a pdf file using the Acrobat PDFWriter the results were "giberish". I've also been noticing that sometimes when I tab to a field on a layout the cursor is not in the field but slightly to the right of it.

I'll continue to test, but in my opinion this product was not ready for release. I'll keep looking at the FileMaker site for a product update.

It is a shame as I am already under pressure from the IT department to stop FM development. The only reason I've lasted this long is because I can produce a solution in 1/10 the time it takes using other products. I was really hoping that this product would give me an even greater advantage.

By the way I am interested in knowing if any of you FM developers are catering to large law firms, especially in the New York City area?

[Fenton]

We had a longish thread about the portal problem here. Basically it's a bug. Hopefully it will be fixed in the next update.

And yes, the text editing is a bit messed up also. I believe it has to do with the big change to the basic text engine, which now supports formatted text in calculations, etc.. But the cursor often is a little off. It can be a pain even in development, especially in Merge fields, though it seems to work OK in short data entry fields.

If you're already arguing with your IT department, I would not try to do implement v7, but begin learning it. There's a lot of changes and new capabilities. Then, when the update comes out, you'll be ready to roll. Once the bugs are fixed v7 will be much more powerful that v6, and you'll be able to defend it.