NightWing Enterprises — Demo for FileMaker Pro™ 10
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Controlling Access to Tab Control Panels!
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Tab Permissions
For FileMaker 10
As a courtesy to fellow developers and potential clients, the
following demonstration file is provided for free download.
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FileMaker's tab controls are a remarkably useful and versatile feature that provide open-eneded access to multiple panes or views of your data. However at times the openness of their nature can be problematic, when you need to provide the user with guidance about what should be done when and keep some areas off-limits some of the time (or for some users).
This demo shows a straightforward technique for constraining the user's access to tab panels, allowing you to specify which tabs the user may navigate to at any point in time. If users attempt to navigate to a tab that is not currently permitted, they will immediately be returned to the tab they were previously viewing. The list of permitted tabs in this example is held in a global text field - however you can implement a calculation that will conditionally determine the permitted tabs based on the state of the data or other variables in your solutions.
The technique, as implemented here, uses a pair of global text fields (with one repetition for each layout in the file) - one to store the tab permissions and the other to keep track of user tab states for each layout (so the user can be instantly returned to their previous tab if they attempt to select a non-permitted tab). Alternatively, these may be stored in global variables if preferred.
This demo makes use of the FrontTabNames( ) Custom Function* (previously published as part of the Tabmeister demo, part of the 949 series).
The Tab Permissions technique is an aid to interface clarity and provides navigation support - you should not regard it as a substitute for security (you need accounts and privilege sets for that). However the technique does provide an important addition to the range of options for control of the behavior of one of the most flexible FileMaker Pro layout objects.
This demo file is unlocked and password-free, compliments of NightWing Enterprises.
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*
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To install Custom Functions in your solution file(s), you will require access to a copy of FileMaker Pro Advanced .
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NB: Should you require assistance implementing procedures such as those shown in our
example files, please consider establishing an account with us for developer support.
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