Nested Tab Controls

[BrentJohn]

Greetings,

I am needing help with a problem I have been working on for the past few days.

I have a Layout with a Tab Control (Main_Tab_Control) having 5 tab panels.  The first tab panel is used to determine what informaiton is displayed on the following tab panels, based on several drop-down menus.  On the last tab panel I want to nest an additional Tab Control (Sub_Tab_Control).  Based on the information from the the first tab panel, I want this Tab Control to display only tabs that are needed.

Ex: on the first tab panel a drop-down menu displays how many floors the building has "1, 2, 3, 4, and so on".  Sub_Tab_Control has 10 tabs for 10 floors.  If 3 is selected, then I want only tabs 1, 2, and 3 displayed.

I am using FM 13 Pro Advanced.

[bruceR]

Move on to another design idea.

[Mark Scott]

Hi Brent,

 

My gut reaction is in agreement with Bruce's on this. It sounds like an overly complex design to develop and maintain, and an overly complex design for users to navigate.  (Everything's relative, of course, so maybe you can pull it off in a way that provides a decent UX.) One thing you can't do directly is selective hide individual tabs in a tab-panel control, so right off the bat you're going to find yourself designing some wiz-bang (is that a word?) work-arounds to simulate this. One additional issue (potentially) is performance, given a heavily loaded layout like this. In a strictly local solution, or a hosted "separation model" solution in which the UI file resides on the client machines, it may be OK, but if you need to move a layout of that level of complexity across a network, that's probably going to be a choke point for you.

 

Let us know if you come up with something, though. Sometimes good things come out of trying to solve complex problems. I'm just worried that the result will end up more complex than the original problem.

 

hth,

 

Mark

[David Jondreau]

I suspect this layout design in pointing to problems with your schema design. You should have a table for Buildings and a different table for floors. You can display a portal of floors and use that to select a particular floor to edit.