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FileMaker Go: Field Interaction Behavior

April 18, 2013 by Darren Burgess 5 Comments

Thought I would share a quick tip that I learned while working on a mobile database application for a customer.

Naturally there are many user interface behavioral differences between the desktop and mobile versions of FileMaker. This one involves the display of a field when the field has focus. Here are two screen shots of the same layout as displayed in FileMaker desktop vs. Go.

Text Field With Focus

Note, that when the field has focus in Go, it mysteriously expands.

Native behavior in FileMaker Go

There may be a legitimate purpose for this behavior, however it may also break the design of the layout on the mobile device. It also represents a departure from normally expected UI behavior on a mobile device. In my work with mobile FileMaker applications, I strive to have the database behave as closely as possible to what users normally expect from iOS apps.

A Simple Fix

Fortunately there is a simple fix for this. Simply apply a vertical scroll bar to the field using the layout inspector (data tab – “Include vertical scroll bar”). Then set the line characteristics for the field to “None”, to prevent the vertical scroll bar from displaying. Now, in FileMaker Go, the field no longer expands when it has focus.

Field with scroll bar enabled

Do you have any other simple FileMaker Go tips that help in development?  If so, share them in the comments!

Filed Under: Layout Design Tagged With: FileMaker Go, Layout objects

Comments

  1. Brad Stanford says

    April 18, 2013 at 10:33 am

    Rockin’ fix, Darren! Nice work. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  2. Bill Miller says

    May 1, 2013 at 8:06 am

    Nice!

    Reply
  3. hate the date says

    November 23, 2013 at 2:59 pm

    thanx! great tip. now how about stopping that stupid date selector from popping up when entering a date field?

    Reply
    • Darren Burgess says

      December 3, 2013 at 4:28 pm

      Now that would be a nice fix! Here is the link for FileMaker feature requests:
      http://www.filemaker.com/company/contact/feature_request.html

      Reply
  4. Darren Burgess says

    December 3, 2013 at 4:30 pm

    UPDATE:

    FileMaker Go 13 fixes this behavior.

    Reply

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