Often recurring text bits

[rikm]

Now that I'm almost finished I can tell you what a stupid job I'm doing here.

I do catalogue descriptions in both French and Dutch.

Some of those descriptions (e.g. for jewelry) contain often the same words and parts of a sentence. I thought I might click them from a portal in stead of typing them over and over again or copy and adapt them.

I came up with a tabel containing (for the moment) nine records with each 12 fields.

Thus I can make a portal of 84 fields.

To make it easy to use I covered each field in the portal with a button. You click it, the contents is pasted in the right spot in the right field and a sentence in reasonable Dutch or French grows...

This means I'm in the process of creating 84 scripts for 84 buttons.

If you find this totally silly and know I much better way, please be quick to tell, because I'm almost there.

On the other hand, I'll be glad to send someone who likes the thought my 84 button-layout and the matching script, I swear it'll save that person quite some buttonmaking!

Rik

[rikm]

I know 9 x 12 = 108, but I decided to use only 8 of the 9 records and when I mentioned 84 buttons, I meant 96...

[Kiwi]

Hi - sounds similar to a problem I had when inserting Tags into fields for an emailing solution. The main problem is filemaker can't track the field you where in when you click on a portal. Here is a quick hack of the solution I came up with. Hope it helps.

INSERTFROMPORTAL.zip

[rikm]

Thanks for the reply and the template, Blakely. However: too late! I made my 96 buttons and my 96 scripts.

Your solution is of course a lot more elegant than mine. But if I get it straight, you would make a script with 96 elses, whereas I made 96 scripts with only an "if" for "Dutch or French".

The advantage in my opinion is, that I can now lay my little carpet of buttons over any portal of 96 fields and scrible whatever is necessary in those fields. We'll see.

Anyway, I keep your template stashed away, it may come in handy.

I attach the monster I created, if for some reason you want to use lots of buttons, you don't have to create them one by one like I did.

There's only one thing you'll have to know: "taal" means language, and 1 is Dutch, 2 is French.

96buttons-fp7.zip

[comment]

too late! I made my 96 buttons and my 96 scripts.

Then why ask in the first place? I don't know how your file is supposed to work (it doesn't work here), but having 96 almost identical scripts is extremely inefficient - just think what it would take to modify a tiny detail in the script. The same applies to the buttons. And how would you deal with adding a couple of terms??

The truth is you don't need 96 scripts, or 96 buttons, and not even 96 "elses". In fact, if you always want to append the term at the end of the field, it can be VERY simple.

InsertTextSimple.fp7.zip

[rikm]

Well, comment, I asked in the first place, because I can always change to a good suggestion of course. But in the meantime I got to move on.

There are 96 fields of which I use about 50% now, so I can add quite a bit.

And I can duplicate the layout using another portal when I want to add new text parts...

Thanks for the attachment, I'll look into it now.

[comment]

It's never too late to do it right. Having a script per record is not right. You should be able to add as many terms as you want just by creating new records. IOW, adding new terms should be in the province of the user, not the developer.

The only minor exception I would be willing to accept is this:

If for some reason you don't want your portal to have a scroll bar (for example, if a portal is arranged as multiple columns), it might be necessary to add further instances of the portal to the layout, when the number of records grows. But that's where I would draw the line.

[rikm]

I changed my skill back to "novice"...

Although I'm using Filemaker since Claris' Filemaker II, I'm a user, not a developer. And what's more, I justed started to adjust some files I made during the last twenty odd years. I still have no idea about lots of the new stuff that went into FM since 7.0.

Thanks for the lesson, Comment.

[rikm]

For what it's worth - say, to document this thread - I'll try to attach the 96buttons again. Nobody'll want to look at it, but what the heck.

Hopefully this time it will at least open.

96buttons-fp7.zip