I have a cabinet shop.

I'm trying to develop a piece of software to help us generate shop drawings.

 

We build a lot of different types of cabinets but we use essentially the same math for all of our work.

Depending on the type of cabinet some of the math needs to show on the shop drawing and some of it does not.

The attached jpeg shows what three typical cabinet styles might look like.

 

The basic report starts with various fields superimposed over a CAD drawing we drag onto a layout.

Depending on the type of cabinet you are building a GO-TO script takes you to the appropriate layout.

There are a lot of acrobatics associated with all this navigation.  

 

Is there a more elegant way to do this with Filemaker 13?

 

Is there a way to have all of these various objects live on the same layout but only become visible based upon a calculation?

 

 

In version 13, you can conditionally show/hide layout objects:

http://www.filemaker.com/13help/en/html/edit_layout.10.22.html#1171261

 

In previous versions, this is kinda possible with (one-row) text fields/objects, by conditionally formatting them to font size 500.

 

 

Another option you might explore is converting your drawings to SVG and showing them in a web viewer. Using a calculation in the web viewer setup itself, you could manipulate the SVG code directly to add/modify elements.

 

 

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P.S. Please update your profile to show your OS (and the version, if you have upgraded).

Thanks Comment.

 

What do  you mean by converting drawings to "SVG"?

Just figured out what SVG means.

Never heard of it.

 

Thanks for the heads up Comment!