My "layout picker"

[ddreese]

I was pretty bored at work yesterday, often times I find myself trying to remember layout #s so I can hop right to them when necessary. My database is rather large and porky, partially due to I'm no longer the only developer anymore (it pains me to have someone else ignoring my purposeful consistencies, hah).

We have a ton of layouts in our file, over 550. The layout chooser dropdown on the status bar is very slow, and there is a glitch that scrolling through the list and clicking on a layout will not take to you the correct one, but the last layout (I'm assuming because we have so many layouts).

So I decided to create another table, that just holds the layout name and layout source table. I wrote a script to loop through each layout, copy it's name and it's source table to variables, switching to my layout picker window, and creating new records in the 'layout' table. This layout list can be updated at any time, but does not do it by default when opening it just because it takes a solid minute or so.

It's really nothing fancy, but I can already see how helpful it's going to be. I have a button to toggle it on my 'home screen', and it pops open in a separate window. Since I have a big ol' monitor (1920x1200) I can leave it open while working in the other window.

I attached a picture as you can see, the "Layout Picker Express Ultra (beta)" merely shows the layouts in a big list. I can choose from the dropdown at the top to sort only layouts for certain source tables, likewise I can click on the source table field in the list and it will give me the layouts that are based on that source table (table occurrence, I guess is the technical term). Obviously, clicking on the layout name will take you to the layout in the main window.

I doubt I'm the first to do something like this, but none the less it's a very good solution for my needs.

I know I should probably be running multiple files at this point, but I like the one-file idea, it's just a mess keeping up with the layouts. I'm hoping they do something with the layout list like they did the scripts window in 9 Advanced where you can group by table occurrence or something.

[Genx]

Nice Interface ???

[Fitch]

Nice idea. Layout list utilities can be handy. Attached is a method I came up with a while back that puts the layout names into a field rather than creating new records.

LayoutLister.zip