FileMaker Layout Tips

I do a lot of fiddling with layout designs for a lot of our different FileMaker projects, and there’s a few useful things I’ve learned, mostly by accident or by blundering around. If you don’t already know these, maybe it will save you some time…

Multiple Inspectors

The day I realized I could have multiple inspectors open was a happy day for me. No more jumping from position tab to data tab, then back again for the next field I needed to review. Just pop open another Inspector window so you can have one for one tab and one for another (heck, if you have a really big screen, why not have one for each?!). To open another Inspector, just select “New Inspector” from the View menu.

Sample Data

We recently got feedback from our E-Com customers that some of the fields on new forms we had created were not long enough for their student names, or for the names of responsible staff members. We thought we had made the fields long enough – our fairly long field names appeared with plenty of room – but we had miscalculated. Using the Sample Data option in Layout mode when the fields were filled with long sample names in Browse mode revealed how we needed to rearrange and lengthen these fields. It was so much easier to do with the sample data visible in Layout! It may be found under View > Show > Sample Data.

Hover

I love the hover function introduced in FileMaker Pro v14! Now I can see what any badge is doing for us without having to dig. It includes any relevant script names. Just hover your cursor over the badge and voila. It tells what conditional formatting, what script trigger, what script, you name it.

Resizing Merge Fields

The Position tab of the Inspector allows you to resize merge fields to better fit the data inside rather than the names of fields – this is really great when you have very long field names with very short data and you need to place other elements around it. Select the merge text area and simply change the width of the field. Showing sample data here can help, as well.

~Alanna Clare

Retaining Object Locations

For those that develop in practically any framework other than FileMaker, retaining object locations is an issue that you’ve really never had to think about, but for FileMaker developers, this is something we have learned to handle over the years. The majority of traditional frameworks use some form of style sheet language to control the basic look and feel of a page, so most objects only need to be defined once. In FileMaker, each layout needs to be specifically designed down to each pixel. Setting a theme can shave a few minutes off the design process, but custom layout objects like navigation bars, icons, and field labels outside of the theme need to be copied and pasted from layout to layout.

Prior to FM12, the only way to copy and paste an object into the exact location from another layout was to make a note of the position in the Inspector before copying the object to another layout. As of FileMaker 12, there’s a new trick: 

• On the current layout, enter Browse mode to commit any changes
• Go back into Layout mode and select the object or objects you want to copy
• Copy the object (Command+C on OSX or Control+C on Windows)
• Navigate to the target layout while in Layout mode
• Enter Browse mode
• Go back into Layout mode again
• Without clicking anywhere on that layout, paste the object onto the layout (Command+V on OSX or Control+V on Windows)

If you accidentally click anywhere on the layout before pasting the object, you can enter browse mode, go back into layout mode, then paste the object and it will retain the location.

That’s it! With all that saved time, you can get in an extra episode of Game of Thrones!
~Joe Ranne