Hello all, just have a small question I would love answered.

 

Is there any real difference when you are hiding something and use...

 

Hide Object When...

vs

Conditional Format (Text Size 500)

 

Obviously in a summary or report field it should make a big difference to use hide when, but for just normal fields or values what is the better practice?

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This topic has been moved from "Articles, Tips, Techniques & Solutions" to "FileMaker 13 General Discussion".

I suggest you use Hide.  Using the 500 pt trick does not always work with certain fonts and (I believe) accessing Remote Desktop.  All I can say for sure is that sometimes the 500 pt trick does NOT hide and in fact, when 12 first came out, it did not work - it turned the text to white only if you used a pre-defined theme.  They fixed it but since we have the tool now to hide, it makes sense to use it instead of depending upon something which might failure in future versions, since it was actually a hack to begin with. :-)

Also it needs to say that hiding an object lets slide up the belove objects in prewiew/print mode and that isn't the case with conditional formatted fields.

I agree with LaRetta about the question of reliability with cond. formatting 500pt.

Let's forget that embarrassing FM12 "New function never functioned" issue with color-attribute = 'none' resulted in white color

If there's no need to have your solution running on FM12(!), I'ld highly recommend using the new 'hiding object' function.

Everything else we did before was just a workaround

Hey Daniele - I haven't needed to create a report using Hide yet and I didn't know this!  Thank you!

This is a little known feature, I guess.

 

Interesting because it also works with the Web Viewer: if it is hidden, does not take space !

other issue is that is the object you are trying to hide is also a button and it is stacked with another button object then webdirect will not allow access to the lower button with conditional formatting but will if its hidden with hide object