Something I have occasionally wondered is, is there a way for record data to affect its layout properties? As an example: in a portal that shows invoices owing, could it be set up so that any that are overdue stand out? So that the company name would go bold, or the portal row's background colour would go red? As an alternative to sorting them to go at the top or having a message appear, I mean.

Anything like that?

Thanks for any input!

... yes... but not exactly in the way you think... we have to use calculation fields... for example lets say we have a clients table and an invoices table showing records through a portal for that client... we would do the following to reflect "overdue items" by highlighting... goto your invoices table, and put in two new fields, one called gColor (global container), one called cHighlight (unstored calc result container) ... ... then we put a calculation into the cHighlight field i.e. If(Duedate < Get(CurrentDate) ; gColor ; "" )

then we put the field gColor on our layout for a few seconds, enter layout mode draw a square filled with your desired color (no lines), copy it, go into browse mode and just paste it into your global field...

... we then simply overlay this calc field over our portal row in the original clients layout, behind the text fields... then the calculation will just evaluate to check if the invoice is overdue ... if it is, then it uses the color stored within the global field to reflect this... otherwise it shows no color...

you can do the same sort of thing if you wanted to bold it... just use a calc field... If(duedate < Get(CurrentDate) ; textstyleadd( textfield ; bold) ; textfield )

confused or need another example just ask

~genx

wow, thanks! i will give that a try next time i'm in at work, looks like fun

cheers!