I'm wondering if I am taking the wrong overall approach here.

The story:

The system has three main objects (client, artist and event.) They want to be able to switch to finding on any of these objects while they are in the middle of updating an object. They also want to have advanced validation which I have implemented via scripts.

The approach I took was to define 6 windows and for each layout, I defined two versions ... one purely for finding without any validation script, and the other with full update capability and using validation scripts whatever way they exit from a record. I thought this would simplify things. On the FIND layouts I put a button to switch to an update layout. So far so good until ...

I discovered that I cannot scroll in text fields if they can only be entered in Find mode. Now I am concerned that I have painted myself into a corner.

Has anyone got a better approach? I would still like to restrict what the user can do if they try to do a concurrent find while updating a record.

I think I have a solution. In another thread it was suggested that if I define unstored calculation fields for all of the fields I want to be able to scroll, I can define them as being able to be entered in browse mode but they won't be updateable. This may be obvious to experience coders but it wasn't too me.

I'm still open to suggestions if anyone has them of better ways I could have approached this.