Printing

Any Tips for Printing DayBack?

FileMaker 16+

Unfortunately, FileMaker 16+ does not support printing web viewers, so the best option is printing a screenshot of the calendar view. It is possible, however, to automate saving these screenshots to pdf; check out this post for more info: Printing Web Viewers in FileMaker 16. Otherwise, you can keep a system running FileMaker 15 to print the web viewer directly.

Think FileMaker should fix this in 16? Give Feedback or view the reported issue.

FileMaker 13-15

Webviewers don't print when they're anchored to opposing sides of a layout so in order to print DayBack you'll want to make a new, simple layout for printing. Here's how:

1. Duplicate the calendar layout.

2. Remove the two rectangular objects behind the webviewer--one warning about working in find more, and then other with a link to these instructions =).

3. On this new layout click on the web viewer and remove the object anchors in the Inspector's position tab (under "autosizing").

4. Make the webviewer as large or as small as you want to fill your page. For example, a webviewer 570 tall by 730 wide fills an 8.5 x 11 horizontal page nicely at 100% (depending on your page margins). Note that you can remove the "Required objects" off screen to the left of the calendar for this simple printed version.

5. That's it. Now print from this layout--either by hand or with a script--and you'll be all set.

Remember that you can also print the Event List layout if you want to see more records than can show up on a month view (for example). Sorting this layout by Start Date, Resource, or Status reveals one of the subsummary parts which can make the layout a bit easier to read. Here again you might consider duplicating this layout and using it as the basis for your own layout used only for printing. Such a layout might have a taller body part so that long event descriptions can print without being truncated.

Using such a custom print list layout is really the only way to print all the information about an event. The calendar's grid-based screens are just too constrained to print more than a small part of an event, or a small number of the events for a day.

The list view won't automatically "keep up" with the day, week, and month views so you'll need to build the found set to be printed by hand, or write scripts to find just the events you want to print.

A user-submitted alternative printing method

DayBack user Robert Parker told us about a really cool alternative method for printing your DayBack calendar view. It uses the "copy from Preview Mode" FileMaker trick, but with a couple of twists. Read about it and add your comment on our forum.

The calendar is blank when printing in a script!

DayBack's webviewer triggers a FileMaker script to gather your event data when navigating to the calendar layout. If there is an active script (running or paused) when the webviewer attempts to trigger the script, your events will not be loaded.

To get around this, separate out everything after your "Go To Layout" step into a second script. Then, after that "Go To Layout" step in your first script, use an "Install OnTimer Script" step calling the second script. Set the timer interval to 6 seconds; you can likely reduce the interval, so test with different values after the script is working. Be sure to put an empty "Install OnTimer Script" step at the top of your second script, so that the timer does not continue to run!

This will allow DayBack's scripts to fire properly (loading your events), followed by the rest of your scripted print process.