Menus and Menu Access

[Fenton]

I've been messing about for the first time with the new Custom Menus. A great idea, but there's a few snags. The fundamental problem is the same as what we've been facing for years. That is the blanket nature of the menu access in a privilege set.

Taking a basic idea of a custom menu: change the single New Record menu command into separate table-specific commands; "New Contact", "New Company", etc.. I attached these to scripts.

If I set the user's menu privileges to "Editing only", then (of course) they could not use the "new" record commands that I'd created; because they weren't Edit commands. I found a work-around, but it's kind of weird. Almost all the Edit commands are conditional upon having something to edit, ie., you have to be inside a field. Except the Preferences command. So I set my specific "new" menu items to run the Preferences command; but overrode that with the script (with no "shortcut" key).

That worked. They appear all the time, and they work. The weird part of it is that on a Mac the Preference command is NOT really in the Edit menu. I worry that some future version of FileMaker will decide to not see that Preference command for a Mac; as the OS X native Preference command is in the FileMaker application menu, and is not configurable.

Another (painful) alternative, which I also did, is to give the user All menu privileges, but disable every possible command you don't want them to use. I did this by tying them to scripts, which the user had no access to.

Actually you have to do some of this anyway, even if the user has Editing only menu privileges; for things like Recover, which I don't really think a limited user needs. After all the whole idea is to strip the menus to only what they need.

If anyone has any clever tricks or ideas for the native menus, please share. It seems useful, but there are certainly limitations.

[SteveB]

I have also been messing with the Custom Menus, but only because Dacons Menu won't work on v8 as yet. All the user actions that I ever allowed have already been scripted for my runtime. To use Custom Menus, all I did was recreate my menus in Custom. I use no Filemaker Menus in their original form.

Not knowing how complex your application is and how scripted it is, you could take the same approach: The user never sees any of the FM default menus...only you (or anyone with the requisite privileges) gets them.

Steve

Edited October 16, 2005 by Guest

[Zero Tolerence]

Thats exactly what I do too steve, and I've not had any of the problems I hear other people talking about.