Editing details of selected portal row and highlight current

[JR4506]

I have been working on this problem off and on and had decided to edit the details in another layout, actually go to related record in new window. But I went back and revisited it and came up with this method.

 

In this instance I am editing a table for cities information. The portal is in a layout in the context of my main table and is related by cityID through a Counties table occurrence. I created global fields in the main table to temporarily contain the data from the cities table and placed those fields on the layout with the portal.

 

I also created a field in the Cities table which is a calculation field for the highlight. The calculated value is

 

If ( Cities::CityID = $$CityID ; "||||||||||||||||||||||||||" ;"" )

 

the above characters are ASCII Character alt 219 this forms a solid bar and when sized and placed to obscure the line at the bottom of the portal row it makes a nice one color background with a the selected item highlighted.

 

The script activated when clicking a item in the portal first sets global variables for all the fields from the city table (these may be used for an undo button later I haven’t done that yet) Then it sets all the global fields above to the values for the selected record.

 

Then there are buttons that go to the a layout in the Cities context and make the changes and then return. I haven't made all the buttons and scripts for editing yet.

 

My questions are; Could there be problems using ASCII characters on other windows computers, and for this to work it requires a refresh window to move the highlight and this causes the window to blink. Is there another way to do update the selection without the window blinking. Is this an acceptable approach to problem of having the selection portal and details on the same layout for editing purposes.

 

 

Thanks,

 

JR

[JR4506]

Update:

 

Thanks to Nightwing Demo file called PortalNavigation I found you can use the contents from a global container field. I pasted a png from fireworks with a horizontal gradient (fades to white on the right side). I also decided not to obscure the portal row lines this caused the lines to appear and then disappear again.

 

The Highlighlight calculation field is set to container (instead of text). The nightwing demo uses a zip script plugin. the method I am using doesn't need a plugin. The blink problem is minimal.

 

On the Edit side of the layout I have three buttons Delete, New, and Save.

 

The Nightwing demo is available online you can google it.

 

Anybody have any comments?

 

Hope this helps somebody,

 

JR