Dynamic column width in a portal

[xtrim]

Is it possible?

[Wim Decorte]

Not easily. It would involve a huge workaround where you'd need to figure out the max width of any field you want to display, put the fields in the portal as merge fields and pad the fields so that they are all the same width as the max field width.

[Vaughan]

I'd have just answered "no". What does that say about me?

[-Queue-]

You're prolific and forthright?

[xtrim]

Ok....So it is not possible (or require too much work).

So.... I will just say to my customer "NO"? after I told hime that with FileMaker he could do just about anything ?!

Well... K SERA

[Fenton]

Well, you can never force an application to do something it wasn't programed to do. In this case the size of FileMaker objects are generally fixed, to whatever you fix them at. About the only exception is the Table layout view. So, a possible work-around would be to pop up a new window, of only the related records, in a table view. If you include a header you should be able to approximate the look of a regular window, with fields from the parent table.

But then you've got another window to deal with, as well as the fact that it's no longer on the original window, nor a portal. Unless it becomes "the" layout, instead of the original one (much like when you print line items). Depends what else is on the original; no other portals hopefully.

I just tried this, and it works. You can Adjust the window size depending on the number of records, to get a good fit. The main drawback is you have to show the column names in order to have anything work, so you're stuck with whatever you named the fields; as well as whatever you named TOs, for any related data (unless you create local calculation fields for them; by which time you're wasting version 7's ability to not have to do that).

And, yeah, it would be cool to have "table view" in a portal, independent of the view of the parent layout. But I don't see it happening any time soon.

[xtrim]

I see...

Well...tnx for trying.

Anyways... as a c/c++/Java programmer I don't think it is much of a big deal to present data as a table (they already have the code for table view)

But it is none of my concern i guess...

[bruceR]

You can do it easily in Servoy. And you can do it in table views. But you can't do it in standard editable portals. But if you want to DISPLAY data using variable width tabs, that is a different matter. See attached example.

VariableTabs.zip