Custom Menu Inactive Status

[mr_vodka]

Hi all,

If I recall, the custom menu feature does not allow the selective greying out of commands from the menu.

I know that the choices under the insert command are greyed out unless a container is selected first. However, I want to disable any menu. I dont think FileMaker allows this.

Has anyone figured out a way to do this without using Dacon's?

We want to standardize the menus across the solution, and those submenus / scripts that are not needed for certain layouts, we would like to 'grey it out'

Thanks.

-John

[SteveB]

I don't believe you can disable a menu entry with the Custom Menu (I tried and couldn't). Why don't you want to use Dacons Menu Control (which will allow that feature)?

Steve

[Fenton]

You can set a Layout to use a certain Menu Set. And you can remove items from the Menus entirely for that layout. Not greyed out, just not there at all. I have to wonder though, if you don't want someone to Insert into a field, couldn't you just make the field non-enterable? You probably thought of that.

[SteveB]

FM's Custom Menu has at least 1 big limitation: you can't stop FM from putting 'Close' onto the first menu. Besides, in a complex solution having lots of different menus is a bit of a nightmare. And lastly, I don't think you can remove the window controls from the individual files.

Steve

[Fenton]

You can set the Close command to run your own script. Of course you still need allow them to close the file, but you can at least test for some condition. And you can stop it from closing if it is not met. But they could still Quit. I haven't tried to block the Quit command. You don't want them to get annoyed and use Force Quit (on a Mac, not sure what the equivalent on Windows is called, probably similar). You can remove the Window menu.

[mr_vodka]

Hi Steve,

Well we used to use the old Dacon plugin. However, after 8 came out we wanted to try and stay away from Dacon. My boss still likes the greyed out feature and currently I am just loading custom menu sets on each layout with a "No options Available" menu item for those that dont have any items they can use. However, again he liked the greyed out feature so that the menus would all look consistant across the entire application. Oh well.

As for the annoying Exit button, I dont like it as well but I guess we can live with it.

I liked Dacon but it became too buggy at times. I wasnt the original developer with the old application but from what I saw if the FM application was closed when the Exit/Close on the menu title screen was removed with Dacon, then it would remove it for all the windows. Annoying.

Thanks anyway.

[mr_vodka]

Hi Fenton,

Thanks for the feedback.

Well I currently do have different menu sets loaded for each layout. What my boss wanted was the 'greyed out' look with consistant menus across all layouts rather than the actual items removed from the menus.

As for the 'Insert Item' repsonse. I was just using that as an example. If one has a container field on a layout, the items under the 'Insert' menu will be 'greyed out'. That was the look I was going for. What I was saying was that if you click into the container field though, it will active the greyed out selections under the insert menu.

Sorry for the confusion.

[SteveB]

Hi John:

Version 1.0 of Dacons was OK, but required a little tinkering to remove menus and then re-install the FM menus properly. Further, you could never get the toolbars back once they were removed without re-starting FM.

Version 2.0 had some real timing issues, and so I never used it. The latest version 3.0 works fine and does not appear buggy. I would re-evaluate its use, given the problems with FM Custom Menus.

Steve

[mr_vodka]

Ok Steve,

I will look into it but given the past history we have had with the old plugins I am not sure how I will justify spending all that money for something FM8 now natively supports. I guess I will have to push based on the reasons of Exit and Title bar removal, deactivating menus items (grey out), and right mouse button features... :