The grey area

[KaosMaker]

Filemaker 12 gave us an absolutely fantastic new feature, among many others: the gray area to the right of the layout, in layout mode.

 

The thing is, does anyone know the nitty-gritty details on how it works, and interacts with browse or preview modes? I'd love to have it spelled out in black and white for me, to eliminate the murky grey area (haha, see what I did there? ).

 

Anyways, the help file simply says all objects in the gray area are right-anchored, skipped in the tab order, and appear in Table view. Upon testing, it seems that fields in the grey area ARE summoned, calculated, pulled, whatever, same as if they were visible (important to know, if you were planning on using the grey area to stash a slow summary field you wanted to temporarily pull out of the layout). That's all well and good, if unfortunate. However, let's say I have a layout that is smaller than my screen, as is often the case. My window is Adjusted via the usual method, so that the window fits the layout size. When I hit the maximize button, and my window expands to fill the entire window...for just a moment, the content previously hidden "off the layout", in the grey area, appears.

 

Perhaps this could be mitigated by having objects in my main layout anchored to the right edge, but that is not always desirable or feasible. This is of more than passing concern to me, because I intend to use that grey area for developer-only objects that should be permanently included in the grey area of most layouts, for use by me and my developer team. I don't want users to be able to see those objects. My temporary workaround includes using conditional formatting to turn "invisible" objects "visible" when Get(Windowmode) = 4 {layout mode}, but that is a pain to remember throughout every layout in a solution. Does anyone have any word on whether this is a bug, and will be resolved, or if there's another explanation for it?

 

Thanks!

K