Displaying portals in Client and IWP

[R2D2]

Hi !

I have a strange problem when displaying portals in FM Client and IWP.

This picture is taken from Client:

Client

And this from IWP: IWP

For some reason two of the portals are not shown in IWP. They are both brought to the front.

What do I do wrong ?

[Søren Dyhr]

Try to change the back to front layers in the layout, the CSS generated is probably covering earlier objects with later. Firefox have an inspector plugin where the developer can see each layer individually.

I could imagine say a background, not made by the native "part" colouring accidentally could be ushered in above a portal, covering it. The native vectored overrules included say jpgs, since they need to be flown in by CSS.

--sd

[R2D2]

Hmmm... Do you mean "Bring to front" and "Send to back" procedures of those portals ? I have tried those and all the portals are "In front" now. But still they are invisible in IWP ???

[Søren Dyhr]

The transparent ViaHealth thingy behind, might be the reason? It's probably a .jpg or such? The tricky thing is that only Firefox/Safari only supports PNG.

It might turn out that you need to build/assemble it from boxes and lines in the native filemaker if you can't find a way to make SVG's work in a webviewer...

--sd

[R2D2]

Yes, that's right. The banner in background is in jpg-format. Would it help, if I convert it to .png ? And why the other portals are visible over the jpg ?

[Søren Dyhr]

First off would I crop it to lowest possible real estate covered, still as .jpg if some of the disguised portals would show up, by this. Perhaps for starters try to inspect it without the background at all.

But you need to have this plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

...or a similar availiable when developing for IWP, since the cascading is pretty heavy in IWP! Or perhaps what is written here:

http://24ways.org/2005/debugging-css-with-the-dom-inspector

--sd

[R2D2]

There maybe something more wrong now. Any changes I make to the page don't appear to IWP. Those 2 invisible portals are both quite new, so they are not updated to IWP. I tried to write some text to the page (outside the picture), but it didn't show up to the IWP page. I also tried to reload and even restart Firefox.

[Søren Dyhr]

What about filemakers own compacting tool, save clone and then import the records into it from the old?

--sd

[R2D2]

Yes. That could work. But first I have to solve why those IWP-pages doesn't update,when I update the solution. Maybe restarting whole server would help, but I have forgotten the passwords to the server... ???

[Søren Dyhr]

You need to clear the cache in the browser as well. What usually is a benefit from choosing firefox over others such as Camino, Opera or Safari is the absence of flickering in portals and such.

--sd

[R2D2]

Clearing cache doesn't help. Actually I have moved from Windows to Mac after last login via IWP. So this is completely new machine with no burdens from past...

[Søren Dyhr]

Well we aren't actually promised everything with IWP, try to read chapter 4 in this:

http://www.filemaker.com/downloads/pdf/fmp85_instant_web_pub.pdf

Complex or layered pictures are not rendered properly. It’s best to create composite pictures in a drawing

program, then paste the image into the FileMaker Pro layout.

--sd

[comment]

Are you sure it's the same file and the same layout?

[R2D2]

Actually... You are right. The IWP -link was pointing to old version of the solution.

My bad... ???

[comment]

LOL, this reminds me of an old riddle:

There is a field with a pipe laying on it. Each day, two dogs come to the field, go to the opposite ends of the pipe and look into the pipe. The pipe is straight and hollow - but the dogs never see each other.

Solution

One dog comes in the morning, the other in the afternoon.