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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Geoff Coffey, co-author of FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual; and in this second part of a three-part series on building layouts in FileMaker Pro, we're going to talk about field formats.

In this segment, we're going to add borders and effects to our field objects. We're gonna set control styles, and we're gonna add scroll bars.

This is how our layout looks now in Layout Mode. Before we get started making more adjustments, let's switch back to Browse Mode and see how it looks for our users. I'll go to the View menu and choose Browse Mode, and you can see that our header stays largely intact. It looks nice. Stays up there, letting us know where we are.

But down here, our fields have some serious problems. They're there. I can see the data in them. In fact, I can click; and I can actually see the outlines of the fields; but when I'm not in the record, I don't have any kind of border of my fields to let me know where I'm supposed to type.

So that's the first problem that we're gonna fix. In order to make changes, we need to switch back to Layout Mode, of course. So I go View, Layout Mode.

Now this field's here when you're Layout Mode to show borders, even though they don't actually have borders in Browse Mode. That's just to help you identify where your field objects are.

So the first thing we need to do is make those borders stick, make them show in Browse Mode, too. So I'll select all of my fields. Now, before, in the last screen cast, you learned about the rubber banding technique. Another way to select a lot of objects is to select one object and then hold down the Option key on the Mac or the Shift key on Windows and choose Select Same. On Windows, this will say Select All instead, from the Edit menu.

And when you do, FileMaker selects all of the field objects. It selects every object that's like the object you had selected when you chose that command. So now I have all my fields selected.

Then I'll go to the Format menu and slide down to Field/Control; and, from there, I'll go to Borders. This is where I format the field borders. This field borders dialogue box lets me assign borders on the top, bottom, left, and right of the field. I'll turn all four of those on.

You can also pick a border color, for instance, black or whatever you want. I'm gonna leave that selected to black. If necessary, you can choose a width. I want a 1-point border, but you can make it larger or you can go with a hairline that prints very thin. And you can apply a pattern if you want. We'll see some examples of that later.

I'm gonna go ahead and push Okay; and now nothing has changed in Layout Mode; but if I save my layout and then switch to Browse Mode, we see that my fields now have borders.

I'm gonna go back to Layout Mode. Now another thing that's nice with fields is to give them kind of an engraved look, to make it look like they're sunken into the layout. It just makes it a little more obvious that those are fields and not just little black rectangles on your layout.

So we're gonna do that now, as well. It's really easy to do in FileMaker. I just select all my fields; and then over here by the fill color, I have a fill effect popup. It's not labeled, but it's got two little blue squares. Click on that, and you can see I have three different fill effects to pick from, and I'm going to choose engraved, which means it's carved out of the layout, if you will.

Now, when I click out, if we zoom – I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here. You can see that this field now has kind of a darker gray border along the top and a lighter border around the edges. To make that stand out a little bit more, we can fill the body part with a color, like a light gray color; and when we do, we'll save our layout.

Switch to Browse Mode, and you can see the fields now look like they're sunken into the layout. They look very nice.

Gonna go back to Layout Mode again. The next problem that we have is that our field objects are now a little bit too small. You can see the Y in City has been cut off, and that's because when we add those engraved borders on our fields, we make the actual field object itself a little bit smaller to make room for those borders.

So we need to make all of these fields a little bit bigger. I'm gonna select every one of them. Now, I could be very, very careful about my dragging; but FileMaker actually knows how big these fields should be. So what I can do is I'll just drag them straight down, bigger than they need to be, and then straight back up again; and FileMaker won't let you go smaller than the field needs to be to hold the text. So when you drag it straight up, you'll see it'll stop you at a certain point. Let go, and now the fields are all sized properly.

Now they're all too close together, and we'll deal with that when we arrange the layout a little bit later. But at least they look a little nicer.

The last thing that we're gonna talk about with field formats is field styles. For instance, we have this Goodness Rating field; and we know, as the developer, that that field should have a value between zero and five in it to represent how good this person is; but our users have no idea that's the case.

You could use things like validations and so forth to give the user an error if they put the wrong thing in there, or auto enters to help them put something default in there; but what would be even better is if we can just keep from making a mistake in the first place. And one way to do that is to change this Goodness Rating to a popup menu instead, and that's really easy.

I'm just gonna select the field, go to the Format menu, go to Field/Control again, and this time choose Setup. And in the Field/Control Setup dialogue box I have a popup menu called Display As where I can pick different field styles from that menu. I'll choose Popup Menu.

Now FileMaker knows we want that field to be a popup menu, but it needs to know what values to show in that popup menu since a menu has a fixed list of choices. So we'll go Display Values From Here, and we will choose Manage Value List. And we'll tell FileMaker what values to use by creating what's called a Value List.

I'll just push New. I'll call my Value List Goodness Ratings; and down here, I'll make sure Use Custom Values is selected; and I'll just type in the values I want with each one on its own line. Zero, Return, One, Two, and so forth. Push Okay when I'm done. Okay again, and now FileMaker has automatically picked that Value List as the values for our popup menu.

When I push Okay, we'll see that this field has changed to look like a popup menu. I can make it smaller, and I'll go ahead and drag it over here so you can see it better. You see it has this three-dimensional effect, which shows us that it's a popup menu; and, in fact, if I save my layout, I'm gonna use Command S, or Control S on Windows, to save and switch to Browse Mode. It is, in fact, a popup menu.

Now, FileMaker has all kinds of different field styles; and we're not gonna look at all of them in this Screen Cast. You can read about all of them in the book; but what we will do, is we'll use one more.

This Notes field is pretty small right now. It's a field that's intended to hold a lot of text, so we wanna make it a lot bigger. I'm gonna go ahead and get the created modified fields out of the way for now, and I'll drag the Notes field so it's a little bit bigger. But still it could be even more than that, and so it would be nice if we had a scroll bar over here, so that it's obvious to our users that they can scroll and see more information.

To do that, we select the field. We say Format, Field/Control, Setup again; and, this time, Display As is still set to Edit Box, just like a normal field; but down here, it says, "Include vertical scrollbar." We just turn that on. That's it. Push Okay, and now you can see a scrollbar in the field.

If I save my layout and switch to Browse Mode, I can now type as much text as I want; and I can scroll through it when I'm finished.