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For quite some time now, it’s been commonplace within the FileMaker development community to lock-down FileMaker’s interface in an effort to take control over various native behaviours that FileMaker Pro exhibits. With the dawn of newer releases of FileMaker Pro, and their new feature sets, I’m seeing less and less of a reason to do this anymore.
Doing this interface lock-down involved hiding the status area (and locking it), which contained a lot of useful controls on it (i.e. Record navigation controls). When these controls are hidden and locked, it means that the end-users cannot access them, and that it will be up to the developer to replace such controls with equivalent controls that they program themselves.
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- FileMaker Pro's Native Record Navigation
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- Substitute For FileMaker's Native Record Navigation
Doing this lets the developer take control over what happens when the programmed buttons are pressed which has obvious merits. For example, if working with an invoicing system, and browsing through invoice records, I would be able to make sure that the end-user lands on an editable layout if the invoice has not yet been sent to the client, and ensure that a read-only version of that same layout loads whenever the end-user were to navigate to an invoice that has already been sent out (therefore preventing editing of historical data).
Now that FileMaker Pro has a good number of script triggers to take advantage of, developers are able to accomplish this same kind of task by triggering a navigational script every time a new record is displayed, and we can do so without forcing the end-user to click on a specific button. This means that the default navigational buttons, menu items, shortcut keys, etc. can be used. And as an added bonus, this kind of design methodology can cut down development costs significantly as we would no longer have to spend time locking things down and recreating the wheel.
In short, I think FileMaker Pro has come a long way. I appreciate the efforts that have been made to make the status area toolbar more presentable and useable, and definitely embrace the new features like Script Triggers that not only make my job easier, but also help you, our clients, save in the budget department.
