Read Records as Book in Webviewer

[H1sc]

 

 

 

 

Fellow developers, a question I must ask (I'm sorry if this seem so unusual; my filemaker development is not the most common)

 

I have a database of paragraphs. The idea being, each paragraph is a record, in a Table named Reference. The whole idea of this database, which has more tables but could work with just one, is to make a manual, a handbook for the company I work for.

 

Let me give a example: we have a specific instruction on how to deal with taxes at importation. We create a record named: taxes at importation, and we related this record to another record in our self-related table (taxes, or importation). So:

 

               RecordID_pk    FatherID_fk      Title

R1                1                       0                 Importation

R2                2                       1                 Taxes at importation

 

the idea is to have a list of related records, with order numbers self-created, all of which I ALREADY HAVE.

 

So our database already does the following:

- organize the record relating it to parents

- performs searches easily (thanks for fmsearch for that)

- easily allows to change parent record

- order the records in a unified string -- 01; 01.01; 01.02; 02, etc.

 

My problem is: we have people (trainees) that need to read the whole manual over and over again (because they want to memorize, and they seem to think this is a good way - who can argue?). We have a "create pdf with all records" button, but they insists on reading live material. And there is some point to that. If the person is reading a theme, and it changes after the PDF is created, it obviously wont go to the pdf (unless another pdf is made). I know that whatever was read before will not be revised (like, any changes in chapter one will be missed if the person is already in chapter two) but he will re-read it eventually; no big deal.

 

As the reading may be exausting, and the trainees have, obviously, other tasks to do, we have a 1000 pages manual, which is something like 60 hours long to read, which the trainees will read 2 hours a day (more or less), 4 days a week. This means that if the trainee generates the PDF today, and we have a change in some topic, he will have to read the whole manual once (60hours/8hours per week aprox = 7,5 weeks) and them re-read the theme, which can cause some stress in this almost two months delay.

 

So, we need to do live reading.

 

My problem is: how to make the best reading experience in filemaker for lots of records with different sizes of text?

 

Some paragraphs are two sentences long. Some, two pages long. Some are just titles. When I print to pdf is very simple (with the slide up feature), but when I make a layout, all I can offer, so far, is a list view with fixed sizes or a form view, with go to next record.

 

 

What I want?

 

First, any suggestion if there is some obvious way to do what I need that I'm missing

 

Second, a way to display all (or some at least) of my records in a list-way in a webviewer. Kind like a wikipedia page has sub-topics (ok, it doesn't need all the fancy jump-to-section, although it would be awesome). Right now, I'm not trying to have the full-implementation, but just to understand which way I may/might follow.

 

Thanks for the help in reading all this long text.

 

Ps: If necessary, I'd be willing to do some html trick or something like (it already has some html tricks in the webviewer)

Edited May 28, 2014 by H1sc

[Fitch]

If you're happy with your PDF, I'd suggest popping up a new window in Preview mode.

Or you could save a PDF on demand.

 

In a web viewer, you enter

"data:text/html," & yourHTML

Google FileMaker Data URL, e.g.:

http://sixfriedrice.com/wp/filemaker-9-tip9-web-viewers-without-the-web/

[H1sc]

Thanks for the help, Fitch. I'll surely take a look at the link of sixfriedrice.

 

But, as occurred to me, I am not happy with my pdf. Maybe I'm trying a step too big, but I'm thinking on going deep in html. I want to give the users the best experience ever (their happiness, their money). Could you point me to some direction on that? I was thinking on collapsing parts of the text, linking one part to another, etc.