FileMaker® Pro Design & Scripting For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Making FileMaker Do Tricks

In This Chapter

• Giving buttons functions

• Adding drop-down lists and pop-up menus

• Inserting check boxes and radio buttons

• Putting the multipurpose Container field to work

• Building your own customized lists

I have a smart dog. She knows how to shake hands, sit up, roll over, speak on signal, sit, lay down, walk next to me, and even how to balance a piece of cheese on her nose. Yes, she has taught me well. Every time she does tricks, I've been taught to give her a treat.

FileMaker is good at doing tricks too, and you don't need to feed it. By tricks, I'm talking about functionality. The number of things that FileMaker is capable of doing is amazing. It's just a matter of showing the owner how to use these functions. In this chapter, you find out how to add buttons and assign functions to them and add drop-down lists, pop-up menus, check boxes, radio buttons, and custom menus to your layouts. FileMaker makes creating these features easy, and they can make your layouts much easier to use.

Buttoning Up the Layout

Buttons are a handy way to add functionality to a layout. For example, in Figure 7-1 , the layout on the top is perfectly functional with the built-in features of FileMaker. However, compare it to the layout on the bottom, which has more functionality built into the layout itself. The buttons reflect common tasks that users will want to do — navigating records, adding and deleting records, and switching to a list of records — and thus make the layout ...