Freeze Window Behavior

[Hijack]

Anyone know what happens in this scenario? You're running a script and you freeze the current window. The script launches a new window, does some stuff and closes that window. Now you're back to the original window. Is that original window still frozen or do you have to reissue another freeze window step? Does the act of opening a new window hork your frozen status on the first window?

[Vaughan]

Freeze Window tells FMP to stop updating the screen display for a while. The behaviour is slightly different between Mac and Windows.

On Windows, the Freeze Window step forces FMP 10 and earlier to do a screen redraw (I think this is fixed in FMP 11). If you open a new window, that window may un-maximise the current window. Neither of these are issues in Mac OS X.

At the end of the script FileMaker does a screen redraw anyway so there is no need to issue a Refresh Window step EXCEPT if you want to refresh portals and unstored calculations in which case issue Refresh Window with the flush cached joins option.

[Hijack]

Thanks for the info, Vaughan. I'm trying to simplify a rather complex script and make it look more professional as it runs. The main issue I'm having with the freeze window behavior is that when you freeze a window and then open multiple windows in front of it then close those new windows down, artifacts of those windows remain displayed on the frozen window.

At the start of the script, I hop to a layout that simply says "Please wait...." and freeze that. Then, I begin hopping around to other layouts in that same window. That works great until I pop up a new window and close it. Then my "please wait" gets trashed by artifacts of the closed window that was on top of it. Since I've moved to a new layout in the first window and am in mid-loop with a process, it's hard to jump back to my "please wait" layout, refresh and refreeze and then go back to where I was and continue processing.

I'm just looking for a way to make a complicated script that pops up a lot of windows and jumps to non-user accessible layouts look good to the end user.

[IdealData]

It is possible to set the window size to 0 x 0. That way you would never render any of the layout switches ad you could have your "..in progress.." on the original window as you could still see it in the background.

[Hijack]

That's a good idea. I'll give that a try.

[Hijack]

Thanks for the tip, Ideal. While you can open a window with 0x0 dimensions, it still leaves the title bar. But, that's ok. That makes the workspace consumption minimal and the new window can be opened relative to the bottom and my "please wait" window can remain unmolested and looking good. All processing continues normally.

[mfrapp]

you can also open it out of the workspace

left: -100

top: -100

[Hijack]

Well son-of-a-gun! It just keeps getting better. I'll give THAT a try next. Never occured to me to try a negative position value.

[Vaughan]

Window refresh never looks as good on PCs as it does on Macs. Apparently FMP 11 is greatly improved over earlier versions.

[IdealData]

That's definitely thinking "outside the box"!