Subtitles of the Movie

As you can see, the portal displaying invoices from the customer perspective has been refined quite a bit. We added the engraving, the 3-D look and coloration on the borders of the portal. We added in all these fields. In fact, we added an extra field called status. It actually exists over inside the invoice, which tells us the status of that invoice, whether it's billed, paid or canceled. But we'll get to that in a second. But we've actually displayed that inside this portal because you can actually pop the menu up here and change the status from the customer perspective if you want and that will also change on the invoice. So we've got all this information here. You can see we bolded some stuff right up here and made it look pretty nice. There's also this little button here that says go to related records, so if we're looking at this invoice, 143.25 and we click that, we actually see that we come to that same invoice. And it just simply opened a new window. That's real easy to design. If we go into layout mode and we double click on that button, you'll see that it's simply go to related record, it's starting from a customers-based layout. So you specify where you want to go through the relationship graph. So we want to go from that portal row all the way to that invoice. That's why we specified invoices here. Show it using the invoices form layout and also showed it in a new window. And then we just gave that a title. It's very, very easy to do. And you'll notice that we also updated all these buttons here. Everything's been sanitized, basically, in here. Everything is working and perfect, so anything that's different than yours, which probably won't show up much here but you'll see on the other layouts that the tabs have been changed and things like that. You should take a note of and change them in your solution. I'll try to point out every single one. So let's go over to one of our other layouts and we'll go to invoices form. Before we do that, though, notice that we've renamed all of these layouts. You should be able to tell very easily the customers form was the same one that was called contacts before and now it's list 1, list 2 and invoices list. These are all pretty easy. And invoices form, we renamed that but we also made list 1 and list 2. All we did was duplicate these two layouts, change the reference as far as what table it's displaying and change the fields on it. It's very simple. Well get to see them. Same with products. Did the same thing here. Line form, didn't do much with that. Just put on form on the end. And then all the extra layouts are down here listed. Now, we also have these little divider lines. Let's take a quick look at those. You can't select them from here, but if you go to the next layout, you'll see we have this section divided. It's simply a layout that has nothing to do with anything and the name of it, if you go to layout setup, is called dash. What that shows up in layouts is this divider line. So it's simply a way to divide your sections and easily see what's going on. So not only did we go through and name these appropriately so they're easy to understand, starting with the table name and then ending with the definition, we also have these little divider lines. And so as we go through these, we'll go into our invoices form and you see we updated these tabs. If you double click on list, you'll see we made a duplicate of our list customers and changed it to list invoices. Let's go ahead and check it out. So now it's not called, uh, list. It's called list customers, list invoices, list products. So if you open this up, it's very simple. The only thing we changed were the two go-to layouts. Everything else is exactly the same. Same with list products. The only thing we changed were these two layouts. So we just duplicated this original one and did that. So very simple. We also came over here and changed the names on all these buttons. Now, we didn't have to do much else because that's one of the advantages of putting all your table into one file is that you can use the same script in many cases. So if you double click on this, this is simply a new record. It doesn't matter which table your layout is attached to. A new record works the same. So where the button is determines whether it's going to make a new record in invoices or customers. And we also changed the names here, so pretty simple stuff. And then we changed the name here in our, our mock status area and what we had to do is add this found field into define database. So if we go in here and take a look, we'll see that we simply, if you have FileMaker Advanced, copied and pasted it to invoices, as well as lines, as well as products. Simply copied and pasted across all these the same formula. It has to be in each table. So once we got that in there, then we had to go ahead and make a minor modification. We just had to simply take a letter out and put it back in and that was good enough to make that realize that, hey, that's the field I want to look for. Otherwise it would have just said bracket, bracket, found, bracket, bracket. You want to make sure you make a modification to this text field so that it re-evaluates that merge field because if you're putting this on the layout and it can't find this found field, and then you add it to define database, it's not going to update automatically. And then so basically the same thing with invoice list 1. You simply just duplicate the layout, change this, change these, you know, change this button right here, all that stuff, added these fields. And same with products form. Updated all the same things, change these names, list 1 and list 2, change those and we did a few things in invoices that we alluded to before. We added the status field and we also added a date posted field. So let's look in manage database here and the first, when we come along, is date post. It's automatically entering through options, auto-entering the creation date, but we're allowing this to be written over. You can overwrite whatever creation date that's entered in there. And then we have our status, which auto-enters some text, just the word billed, because most invoices right when you set them up are billed. So when we come in here and go to browse mode, we'll notice that when we create a new record, that it automatically puts the word billed in there, automatically puts the date in there and you can fill in the customer and then fill in the products and so on, just like you did before. And so I also went back and added different statuses to each of the existing records, plus put a date posted on there because auto-enter doesn't go back through the existing records. And so that's just about it. What you want to do is update all these things inside of your interface. They're all things we've done before. That's why I crammed them all into this quick section of this tutorial; because I don't want to spend a lot of time redoing everything we've done. We want to get on to the new stuff. We want to go ahead and cover things that you haven't seen before. So you should be able to do all this stuff. It's nothing new. Go back and make all these changes. You might have to pause your database several times to get there, but it should be pretty easy to do.