What I want to do:

I want to conditionally hide or show fields in a portal row.  The catch is a simple "background fill transparent" won't work on fields with drop shadow and additional styles as the styles still bleed through.  I want the entire field to completely disappear with no trace.  I know how to do this with portals on fields on the outside, but this is already part of a portal.

 

 

 

The Why:

The portal holds line items on an orders screen.  When an order is submitted, certain assembly items explode to predetermined levels using their BOM information.  I want this information visibly indented based on the the level it is on so that is easy for someone going back to this order in a review session to know what line items were added as part of what assemblies.  

 

Currently we have no items where it is necessary to explode beyond the first level to display on a order so single level indentation is acceptable. However the ideal setup would be one capable of indenting on multiple levels as our BOM system can potentially go an indefinite number of levels deep and there are no future guarantees that we will continue to only explode to 1 level.

 

Our BOM view/management system uses indentation, but that is calculated within a elongated field just adding a number of spaces in front of the content based on level.  The poor sales people don't have screens big enough to do this.

 

 

 

 

I have an alternative with just plain text I may use in case this is impossible.  There's no level of urgency on this though so I figured I might as well ask and try to learn something new before doing it.

Since you're using drop shadows on fields, I presume you're manually futzing with the layout objects' CSS? This catch you've run into is why it's a best practice to stick with the formatting options FileMaker provides. Manually editing CSS directly happens to work (for now), but it's not documented or supported behavior. The drop shadows you've added may no longer work in future versions of FileMaker, and there's no telling what FileMaker will do with styles applied without using FileMaker's tools — FileMaker is not responsible for the consequences of coloring outside the lines.