Hi,

I'm working on a solution which includes my invoices and I appear to have 'boxed my self into a corner'. If anyone can offer some advice it would be much appreciated.

Here's what I have

A wide, full-screen layout with 2 separate 'Tab Panels'. Each Tab Panel has 3 Tabs. In the right-hand Panel, I have Portals which show a list of the invoices, according to some self relationships. 1 is a filter based on names and dates, the 2nd is based on Paid and Outstanding and the 3rd Currency.

Clicking on one of the Portal Rows in any of these Tab Panel Portals, will show the relevant record in the left Panel. The Tabs in the left Panel show the record in various views.

Here's what I want to do

I'd like to add one more Tab to the left-hand Panel, with 'dynamically' updated Summaries created from the right-hand Tab Panel's portals.

This is fine and doesn't pose a problem in itself, except that I have 3 Portals whose summaries I want to see on the left-hand side ... in *just one* of the left-hand Tabs.

It seems to me that I need some sort of 'get' function so that I could say :

Case (Get (ActiveTab) = "List" ; summary1 ;

(Get (ActiveTab) = "PaidOS" ; summary2 ; )

Does this make *any* sense? Any suggestions on how I can acheive my goal, allowing that I'm not going to change the whole DBase layout-design to let me include the summaries on the same Tabs as each individual Portal?

Grant

Well ... no-one had anything to say ... :

But never mind ... I've found a way to do this myself.

*However* ... it relies on being able to put a button on top of the 'Tab Panel' or 'Tab Control' button. And to my *astonishment* it seems that this can't be done!! So I come back full-circle to trying to find some kind of 'tab' status function.

I'm frankly stunned that FM have made Tabs easy, by doing away with the whole layout switching thing ... but at the same time, made layout switching necessary for anyone who wants to run a script, or have a layout based calc, at the same time!! It appears you have to go back to the old way and use multi stacked layouts!!

Surely I'm wrong about this? There must be an easy way of doing this. If only the FM help was of at least *a little* help. But FM appear to try to make it unseable.

Ho hum ... so do I have to go back to layout duplication in order to run a script (or use a tab dependant calc) when switching 'Tabs'??

Any help much appreciated.

Grant

Hi

this problem has many solutions

You can read about them in this sub-forum !

Hi,

thanks for the pointer. I realised that someone must be discussing this, but couldn't find it here in the plethora of forums nor via google. Ho hum.

I've managed to make a 'kludge' that is virtually un-noticeable by using the redundant 'Tab Panel' on top trick.

Tab-Panel scripting or Tab-Control 'ID', certainly seems to be quite an omission, but to be fair, it's not that simple for Filemaker to implement. However, it seems to be clear from applying the trick, that if Filemaker do include this funcitonality, then Tab Panels will have to stay *as the user left them* when a layout is exited, otherwise unexpected results will occur. I guess we could call this 'Tab-Pop' and now that 'Portal-Pop' is fixed, it's comforting to know we still have a dumb thing to deal with using a 'kludge'!

Grant