Creating a new layout script

[Dan Singler]

I am looking for a script to create a new layout so that the user can customize thier own one time reports.

If this has been addressed already, I am sorry for the repost, but I could not find anything. Also thanks in advance for all/any help.

Dan

[RalphL]

You can not create layouts by scripts. You must go into layout mode and create them there.

[Dan Singler]

Thank you for the response.

[Vaughan]

There are a couple of ways to allow users to customise reports. Getting them to create new layouts is one way, but it's not always appropriate because it requires technical knowledge of FMP, and it's easy for the user to bugger things up. Besides, the new layout cannot be included in scripts to automate processes unless you give them access to create scripts... and the hole just gets bigger and bigger.

Alternatives are letter merging/templating systems which are a bit of work to set up for the developer but easy for the end users to wrk with; or going to an data export system where the formatting and wrangling is done in another program. The letter templates are all done in FMP while the export data system uses another program (Word or Excel) to do the work.

I posted a letter template demo some years ago in the sample files forums; clients are asking less and less for letters to be printed preferring to send either e-mail or pdfs, so the export option is probably the way of the future imho.