Visual Display of Portal Grouping
FileMaker's Layout mode is pretty robust in terms of what you can design and present in your user interface (if you overlook the lack of native gradients and native OS widgets). When working with portals, in particular, all you have to do is throw your buttons and icons on the first row and magically, they all appear and function on any other row - respective of the row they are on. Very helpful indeed.
So what about those times when you REALLY need to exercise control over what will display on a given row and the times when one row needs to know what's on the next row or previous row.
Well, there are some hidden little tricks you can use to really take advantage of this powerful portal formatting. Watching this video will provide you with the insight necessary to exercise this control!
Comments
You could also....
I made a calc field and used "Get ( RecordNumber )" and used that with GetNthRecord instead of the @@. Just an idea.
Bug
If the field that you display on the conditional formatting has any numbers in it, it will not function.
So if you put:
@@ <>
or even:
@@ 123
It breaks. I really liked this one too.
You can parse any text.
Using something like getvalue ( substitute ( @@ ; " " ; ¶ ) ; 1 ) will pull out the first number when there is a space between them.
-- Matt Petrowsky - ISO FileMaker Magazine Editor
Bug
I think you may have misunderstood my bug report. In your technique file, on the layout, on the left of your portal you have "@@ << FieldName>>". If the field has a number in it, it won't render.
If you did not misunderstand me, then I misunderstood your reply and perhaps you could expand on it?
PS, I just realized that my initial bug comment was not rendered properly because I did not use html entity, so the characters were stripped out.
Bug Workaround
A simple work around finally dawned on me. Enter the Merge Field (with numbers) onto the portal, which will display on all rows, but then put another graphic over that merge field, with the @@ on it, and set that as conditional to fill the desired color on bottom and middle rows. Problem solved.