Database Reference
In-Depth Information
▪ Turn off the
Resize
control to keep users from manually dragging the size of your cus-
tom window.
NOTE
You can get into trouble if you create a dialog window with disabled close controls without provid-
ing another way to close the window, like a button on the window's layout. The only way out of this
mess is to quit FileMaker. On the Mac, you might even have to force quit the program.
All the window control options are available for regular and floating document windows, but
the Minimize and Zoom Control Area options are not available for dialog windows. When
you disable one of a window's title bar buttons (Close, Minimize, Maximize) the correspond-
ing menu command is disabled, too.
POWER USERS' CLINIC: CONTROLLING THE DISPLAY
If you want to pull out all the stops, you can use a combination of layouts, custom menus (
Custom
Menus
)
, window styles (
Specifying Advanced Style Options
), tooltips (
Tooltips
), and scripting to al-
most completely take over control of your database. You can hide and lock the Status toolbar and
then give people buttons to go to the next, previous, first, and last records. You can make it so that
when you click a customer on the List layout, a new detail window pops up named after that particu-
lar customer. You can even make your script so smart that it selects an existing detail window for the
customer if one exists, and makes a new one otherwise. In this way, you give people the impression
that each customer has his own window, and you make comparing customers side by side a breeze.
This kind of high-level window management takes a fair amount of work, so most people stick with
the normal every-layout-in-one-window approach and let people create windows as needed. Your
approach depends entirely on how much time you want to spend writing scripts and how important
the multiple-window display is to you.
Bringing a Window to the Front
In scripting parlance, you bring a window to the front by
selecting
it. As such, you use the
Select Window
script step. It has one option, which lets you specify a window by name, or
step to show a hidden window and bring it to the front.
