FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced Tutorials
Event Driven Scripting / Custom Quick Find
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Subtitles of the Movie (FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced / Event Driven Scripting / Custom Quick Find)
In the Intermediate tutorial we programmed a Quick Search feature in the Customer List layout, so let's remind you how that works. We put a Global field in the Header that you can type into so you don't have to show the Status Toolbar to use a Quick Find feature and as soon as you click out of that field it does a search for you. Now there's a couple things I'd like to correct. One is I'd like to be able to delete out of there and have it do a Show All Records. In addition, I'd also like it to be dynamic across all of our layouts and a simple little change will make it work that way. But let's go into Layout Mode and see how easy this is to modify. If you have FileMaker 11 and the Quick Find feature it's so easy to modify how this feature works because right now you can see the flags, have it search all the fields right now. But if we don't want it to search every field well, we can come in here and select Phone and E-mail and uncheck Include field for Quick Find. It's that simple. We just modify it; now it's only searching these fields, we don't have to touch that script, so that's great. Now what if you don't have FileMaker 11, though? What if you want to use Operators? So, in other words, if you need to use the greater than or less than or some other operator, Quick Find doesn't support that. Or, if you have a downloadable solution on your website then you need to make sure that it's compatible with every .fp7 version all the way from FileMaker 7 to 11, well, you can't use the Quick Find feature. So we're going to show you an alternative method but first we're going to go into our script that we have already and show you what we've got. It's not very complicated. What we want to do is make a quick change. First we're going to change this Custom Dialog here so it's dynamic. We've done this quite a few times but I'm going to show you again. I'm going to go leftwords open paren get layoutname close paren semicolon 1 close paren, close that off again because we're going to put a proper over here, open paren, then put in ampersand quote space and now that's a completely dynamic message right there. I'm going to copy this right here, double-click here and then just take the proper out. We've done this quite a few times so I'm doing it very quickly but the whole point is now this works across all of our layouts - Invoices, Products and Customers. Now, what we're also going to do is put an Else If in here. We're going to say: If Get LastError equals 400, if that's true, then we're going to go ahead and Show All Records, so we'll just duplicate this. Move that down there, we'll save that and we'll try it out real quickly. So we'll go into Browse Mode. We'll type in j, it does the Find, come in here and remove it, it shows all records for us. So that's great. That's exactly how I want this to work. But what if you don't have FileMaker 11? What if you want to use operators? Well, let's go ahead and duplicate this script here, come in and edit it, call it Find Quick before FM11. We're going to take out the Perform Quick Find here. Normally we'd have Set Error Capture, the Perform Script, but this was written a long time ago and I'm not going to worry about it because you're very familiar with that. So what we have to do is we have to say Enter Find Mode, take the Pause off, do a Set Field, we'll specify that we're going to search our let's say, full name field, there it is and what we're going to search for is what's inside that Global field. So we'll come over to our quick find field, there it is right there, put it in there, and then we'll say Perform Find. So we're already seeing a couple of problems here, or maybe you're not, I'll point them out. First of all, we have to know what layout we're on so, you know, because we're specifying this CUSTOMERS name full so it's not quite as dynamic. We'd have to write, you know, some If statements here to change what field we're setting. Plus, if we want to search more than 1 field we either have to make a calculation that concatenates everything or put several Set Fields here with new requests in there. So, not quite as flexible, you know, as easy to use as a Quick Find feature, but you might find a use for this. So, that all works great, this all should work the same and then what we have to do, since we're going to change this a little bit, because we're going to put a go to field in here. I'm going to say: Go to Field and we'll go to our GLOBALS, go down to our quick find and you'll see why we're putting this in there, because we're going to change how our script trigger works. We're going to go in there and set the script trigger, we're going to take it off of OnObjectExit and make it OnObjectModify. We'll come down here and find the new quick find here and let's see how that works. So if we come in here and start typing you notice that as we're typing that it automatically does the find. We don't have to hit the Enter key, in fact I see one little problem here, I don't want it to highlight here so let's change that, let's go in here and turn off that Select entire contents and see how that works. So you can see I can go ahead and type and each time I'm typing it's filtering that list. So that's kind of nifty. I like that little feature and so you can use either one of these, just don't forget that we have two List Layouts, so you have to change them to be the same, running the same script, so we'll come in here and say: Set Script Trigger, change it to OnObjectModify, and then find our new one and then we're all set. We've got everything done here. So, decide which one you want, what kind of solution you're doing, but really you should know how to do both techniques so with any situation you're prepared with the right tools.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | FileMaker Pro 11: Advanced |
| Author: | John Mark Osborne |
| SKU: | 34140 |
| ISBN: | 1-936334-36-4 |
| Release Date: | 2010-07-09 |
| Duration: | 14.5 hrs / 159 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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