Portal Paging with Resizable Portals

Within FileMaker, the methods for presenting related information extend to calculated fields, web viewers and portals. The most obvious of these is portals.

Portals allow you integrate icons, graphics, buttons, fields (of course) and work in all kinds of user interface tricks. One of those tricks, from earlier versions, was creating a fixed sized portal and then paging through related data a group at a time.

Show ten rows and you can page through easily because you know how many rows there are. What happens, however, when you have a variable number of rows? You need another mechanism in order to determine the row count and be able to page through the data.

So what if we add the fact that FileMaker 12 actually allows you to turn off the scrollbars on a still scrollable portal? Wouldn't that be cool?

Well, give this video a view and you'll quickly find out you can do more than a few cool tricks with this new knowledge!

AttachmentSize
PagingPortalsScrollbarless.zip46.75 KB

Comments

Hey Matt,

On the new portal paging you mentioned that the sound windows makes when you scroll through that portal on the technique file cant be disabled but it actually can. If you go to your windows Sounds and look for one called Start Navigation (Windows 7), it should be playing a wav file called something like "Windows Navigation Start". If you change the audio file being played to none which is at the top of that drop down menu, it will disable the portal scrolling sound in windows.

Mark Johnson
On Hold Company
mark@onholdcompany.com
800-492-9030 Ext 103

Mark Johnson
Aroma Impressions
mark@aromaimpressions.com

Did mean to imply that it couldn't be done. Sorry, about the confusion. What I meant by the comment in the web viewer is that the sound can't be programmatically changed within FileMaker. I knew it could be changed within the OS, but you can't expect users to do this on a networked solution - unless you give them the guidance to do so.

Here's one part of what I said...

"The sound for this is controlled within the system and can't be disabled (as far as I know) from within the web viewer or [within] FileMaker"

If using the web viewer on Windows is something I would do, then I would probably search for a Java class or something where I could use ScriptMaster or some other plugin to modify the registry to set the sound off. Although, some users may notice this change and some people don't like it when something in their computing environment changes.

As you mention, if I were to use the web viewer, I would show the users how to disable it. Otherwise the alternative is something like this

http://honza.24usoftware.com/indicate-progress-in-filemaker-go-and-11

Thanks for the comment!

-- Matt Petrowsky - ISO FileMaker Magazine Editor