Dynamic graphic without using a web portal?

[HALBURN]

I am struggling to reproduce a breadcrumb-like graphic in FileMaker. The content needs resize dynamically. Does anyone have any ideas on how/if this could be done? I was trying to do it without using a web portal but I don't think it's possible. Thanks.

[dansmith65]

If you want content to resize dynamically then the only options I see are a container field or graphic directly on the layout with autosizing, or a web viewer. It sounds like the autosizing option isn't what you want so the web viewer is probably the way to go.

An alternative may be to use text with a graphic background. The background would need to be as wide or wider than the largest breadcrumb you want to display, then the text could use some sort of delimiting character like:

one > two > three > four

[HALBURN]

Thanks for your feedback. I was able to get there with a series of stacked graphic containers linked to separate table occurrences based on the length of each word.

[dansmith65]

Can you explain in more detail? Maybe provide a screenshot? I'm curious to see how you accomplished this.

[HALBURN]

Here is a sample FM11 file that illustrates the technique: http://goo.gl/KcJhY

The font needs to be a fixed-width font for this technique to work properly.

Otherwise the words will not overlay the graphics properly.

For this demo I used 18pt "Andale Mono" (by Microsoft).

There are 3 containers stacked on top of each other (one for each text field)

This demo will only display a total of 9 text characters.

The graphics were created in Adobe Illustrator and were exported as PNG with transparency.

[HALBURN]

Here is a screen capture:

[dansmith65]

It's pretty amazing what you can do with FileMaker when you put your mind to it. When you first asked this question, I couldn't think of a way to do it with container fields, but you managed it. Then, seeing your demo file got my wheels turning, so I modified it to make it easier to implement.

I used a repeating calculated field to display the graphics, and split the graphics up into their individual elements.

dynamic_breadcrumbs_v04DS.zip

[HALBURN]

Great work! ...thanks for the modification. With some polished graphics I think this will work well.

I have been thinking about using repeating container fields to put a blue version of the graphic on the end. Hopefully I will have time to experiment with it again tonight.