20 April 2025: Demo and article updated to incorporate a couple tactfully-worded suggestions from Tony White to make the technique more robust. Thank you Tony.
Demo file: transactional-card-window-v3.zip (requires FM 20 or newer)
Resources
- Card windows — Windowing in FM 16: First Impressions
- Transactions — A Practical Guide to Transactions in FileMaker (ClickWorks)
Introduction
Recently a colleague and I were discussing ways one might go about having a card window be both modal and transactional. By default card windows are modal to the “background” window (the window they were generated from), but are not modal to other windows in your solution.
In this case we wanted the card window to be modal to the entire solution, so that once it was displayed the user would not be able to do anything else in FileMaker Pro until they had dealt with that window.
Additionally we wanted to leverage the transactional model, so that edits would take place in standard fields, with changes made by the user committing if they clicked Save, and evaporating if they clicked Cancel. Reminder: transactionality is an all-or-nothing proposition. You either get all your changes or none of them. You never end up with half baked data.
And, finally, we wanted to map the Esc key to the Cancel button, and map the Return and Enter keys to the Save button. Continue reading “Modal Transactional Card Window”
