Locking out keyboard shortcuts

[lamBRETTa]

A new question here...

Is it possible to prevent people from using the keyboard shortcuts

to do things such as create new records or delete records?

I have built scripts that need to be used when performing these tasks and

would like to limit peoples usage to these scripts exclusively.

[BrentHedden]

There's no way natively to prevent this.

I have found one kinda odd way of doing it, but it's not guaranteed. I'm using a macro program to help me out with my long, repetative calculations. Well, come to find out that I set one macro up as Ctrl-J, which screwed things up with FileMaker. In the sense that it didn't show all records like I wanted to, because the macro took precedence. If I set up a "blank" macro for each keyboard shortcut to disable, that would work out.

The much better way of doing this - New Millennium has created a very cool plug-in called Secure FM. It has all kinds of prevention type of stuff, including what you want to do.

[lamBRETTa]

Thanks...i will look into the New Millenium plug-in.

It sounds promising.

[comment]

It is possible to prevent users from using menu commands AND their associated keyboard shortcuts. Go to File > Define > Accounts & Privileges.

Your scripts need to be defined to run with full access privileges.

[Ender]

In Accounts and Privileges, changing the Available menu commands to "Editing only" or "Minimum" for the user's Privilege Set will prevent the users from accessing those functions in the contextual menus as well as through the menu bar. You will then need to script the creation and deletion of records, plus any other functions that are needed but not available through the menus.

In this case, there's no need to run scripts with full access privileges, unless you have set the privilege set to not allow access to create, edit, or delete records.

[BrentHedden]

Oh whoops! My suggestion was for FM 5&6. I had forgotten that 7 has all these cool new security features!

[Ender]

Hi Brent,

I hope you'll be happy to learn that the security feature I described is also available in FM5/6's Passwords dialog. This has been a quiet, but important feature in securing filemaker databases for those without the Secure FM plug-in.

[Fenton]

Yes, this has been there for a long time, relatively unchanged since FileMaker 3 I believe (don't have it anymore to check). It blocks out almost all keys, including ones for Find, Show All Records, etc.. So you need buttons for those as well.

If you give them Editing Only they'll still have some keys, like Insert Date. If they have Minimum then they don't even get those.

[BrentHedden]

Ok - I'll shut up now, since I don't know what I'm talking about

I've never had a need to use this feature. Sorry 'bout that.

[lamBRETTa]

Thanks everyone...looks like theproblem is solved.

Since i have made scripts for creating and sorting, etc...records, i can

lock out all the key commands.

Onto the next question...

First i will search the forum for answers though.