Tag: Open Transaction

Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 21 or later

Closing Windows During Transactions

Kevin Frank

Update 2 Aug 2025: the issue documented in this article has been resolved in FM 22 (a.k.a. FM 2025).

This article documents behavior in the current shipping version of the product, i.e., FM 21 (a.k.a. FM 2024).

Demo file: transaction_test.zip (requires FM 21 or later)

This is a follow-up to last month’s article on Modal Transactional Card Windows to address a very specific question. Given that transactions are scoped to a window, does a transaction properly revert when you close the window where the transaction was initiated?

At first glance it would appear that the answer is yes, but appearances can be deceiving, and today we have a demo file from Jonathan Jeffrey that can help us understand what is actually going on, and which I am sharing with his kind permission. Continue reading “Closing Windows During Transactions” →

Claris Pro, Level: Intermediate, Version: FM 20.2 or later

Modal Transactional Card Window

Kevin Frank

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

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” →