Recently I received a dual-technique FileMaker 12 demo from Eden Morris. Here’s what he had to say about technique #1:
In the Relationships Graph I show the use of colored labels to indicate where record creation, cascade deletes, and sorted relationships are enabled. Looking at the graph it easily shows that I can create customers from a company table but that they don’t cascade delete, you can create invoices and invoice lines from a project and the invoices and their lines cascade delete, and that the invoice lines are sorted.
It’s an elegant way to display this info (but for some reason, it makes me crave jelly beans).
Now on to the public-facing portion of the demo and technique #2. I imagine most FileMaker developers would use an unstored calculated container field to achieve this two-state icon effect…
…but that’s not what’s going on here. If we pop into layout mode, it appears that a couple of overlaid images have had a bit of conditional formatting judiciously applied to make one or both of them disappear (by “filling” them with no fill), like so:
But if you’ve ever tried to apply conditional formatting to an image, you know that some sort of trickery is at work here, because you can’t apply conditional formatting directly to images. The trick turns to to be to create a text block containing nothing but a space, and then to set the background fill of the text block as an image:
…and now you can apply conditional formatting as you see fit. This is a great example of lateral thinking, and refusing to take “no” for an answer. I said it last year when I reviewed Eden’s SQL Builder, and I’m going to say it again now: “Very nicely done Mr. Morris.”