FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual

Custom Menus

FileMaker’s menus are all about power. Through them, you can control—and limit—your users’ access to the whole feature set. As the developer, you need all those commands to do your design and development of your database, but there are plenty of commands that give too much power to your users, particularly folks who don’t have much computer experience or who aren’t shy about experimenting with commands, even if they aren’t sure what might happen at the other end of a dialog box.

Luckily, with FileMaker Pro Advanced, you can completely customize the menus your users see. You can remove the Delete All Records and the Replace Field Contents commands for all your users, or you can remove them only from certain users’ privilege sets. If you’re the type of developer who likes to take charge of the user interface, custom menus are your dream come true.

Here are just a few of the things you can do:

• Remove potentially destructive items from menus: Delete All Records, for example.

• Edit menu commands: Change Modify Last Find to read Repeat Last Find, perhaps.

• Add, edit, or remove keyboard shortcuts: If you can’t remember that Ctrl+S (⌘S) does not mean Save in FileMaker, then you can at least prevent that pesky Sort dialog box from popping up every time.

• Remove entire menus, like the Window menu, which can be confusing for folks new to FileMaker Pro.

• Run a script from a new or edited menu item: Substitute a custom Delete Record script (complete with a custom warning) for FileMaker’s normal ...