FileMaker Pro’s Custom Menus and the Status Toolbar

Following up on last week’s CoreFM blog, one of the interesting things about FileMaker® Pro’s Status toolbar is that you can actually override the behavior of some of its buttons by using custom menus. It’s something that takes a bit of work to set up, but once you get the hang of it, it allows for quite a bit of flexibility.

Looking at the custom Menu Dialog and editing the new record command, it looks something like this:

On the right, there are options to overwrite the name of the New Record command, as well as the action associated with it. This allows you to override the default behavior of the New Record menu item so that it runs a script you created (in this case it will run a script called New Contact).

The interesting thing is that the Status toolbar is also affected by these changes. If you look at it now, the ‘New Record’ button is replace by ‘New Contact’, and will run the New Contact script.

Since you can associate a different custom menu with each layout, you could customize the status bar for each table in your solution (contacts, companies, invoices, etc). While this won’t work for every control on the toolbar (the Find button doesn’t look like it can be overridden), it will work with most of the common ones (New Record, Duplicate Record, Delete Record, etc.).