#Filemaker optimal layout size download#
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Interesting! What we can see here is that the odd positions in the tab control are given the names of the items in the menu. Let’s look at the tab control setup next. We aren’t going to be using this object for placing other objects in, we are only concerned with the names. The height of the overall object has been reduced such that there is actually no content space, it’s just the height of the tab names themselves. Here is the same tab control object highlighted in layout mode. Notice how all of the spacing between the dividers and the items are all consistent. This is a tab control, designed to look like a breadcrumb menu. This means it doesn’t matter how much or how little text goes into each tab name, they won’t all end up the same width. The reason why tab controls are so great for this, is the simple fact that the width of each tab control name is variable in width. What’s that, I hear you ask? A tab control? Surely a tab is the last object you’d think of to build a breadcrumb menu right? Well maybe, but the fact is tab controls are the perfect layout object for building them (short of an actual breadcrumb menu layout object!). The simple fact is these are all complex and a real pain to work with, and you still do not achieve a really beautiful result. Some involve creating button bar segments based on calculations, where the text inside each segment is padded with spaces to make it a certain width, while others involve starting off with hundreds of small segments, and programmatically removing certain segments and padding others. Now, we have seen people come up with attempts to work around this fixed width segment issue. This is what it looks like in layout mode, to further illustrate whats going on. Add to this the fact that typical breadcrumb menus have a divider between each element, and you end up with a pretty average looking menu. The issue we have is that each segment has a variable amount of text, yet we can only have a single width per segment.

#Filemaker optimal layout size crack#

Here is a crack at building a breadcrumb menu with a button bar. So what does this mean for us in real terms? You have no control over the width of each individual segment. If you extend the width of the bar to 200pts, then each segment grows to 20pts in width. So if you have a 100pt wide button bar, with 10 segments, then each segment will be 10 pts wide. Button bars are of a fixed width, and the segments within the button bar are all proportional in width to the overall width of the bar itself.

You can calculate the text to appear in each segment.īut here’s the problem.

Clickable, as each segment is essentially a button.

Multiple segments, each could be a step in the hierarchy.

It has a number of properties that suit a breadcrumb menu:

Many peoples first instinct would be to use a button bar to design and build a breadcrumb menu.

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These navigation elements are clickable, so the user is free to traverse back up the hierarchy to any point they wish. The user currently resides at the right-most location in the menu, and as you scan to the left you can work your way back up the navigation hierarchy all the way to home screen. This is a location based menu, as the items in the menu are locations within the solution the user can navigate to. Here is an example of a standard breadcrumb menu. This will help you follow along with the content of the article and help you to understand what we are talking about.

#Filemaker optimal layout size download#

Rather than wait til the end to check out the demo, we strongly recommend you download and explore the example file as you read.

So what do we mean by these? We’ll start off by giving an example of a breadcrumb menu built using a button bar, discuss some of its limitations, and then present our alternative implementation using a tab control object. In the FileMaker world, people have been making breadcrumb menus in various forms for a while, the most common implementation is that of a repeating fields, button bars, or in the case of vertical menus, a portal.Īnd while all of these methods are workable, they tend to have limitations when it comes to 2 aspects - the visual quality of the menu, and the ability to customise and extend the menu. They also provide a really quick and easy way to navigate up/down that hierarchy if needed. They tell the user a lot about where they are within a solutions hierarchy.