FIRECOP1 wrote:I WAS ACTUALLY UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT FILEMAKER HAD A BUILT IN FUNCTION TO AUTO CREATE THESE TABS OR SUB-FORMS OR WHATEVER BUT I CANT SEEM TO FIND ANY DOCUMENTATION ON IT ANYWHERE.
STEP BY STEP WALK THROUGH WOULD BE GREAT FOR ME TOO
OK, here we go.
Integrating CC Tabs into Another FM7 File
1. Download. The first thing you'll want to do is download a fresh copy of CC Tabs. We converted this file to FM7 and adjusted all the graphics so they are now aligned with the way 7.0v3 renders containers. (Your download will include both FM6 and FM7 versions of CC Tabs.)
2. Your FM7 File. For the sake of this explanation, we'll assume that you wish to use CC Tabs in a new FileMaker 7 file called "Thing" and that this file has 4 layouts, each of which you'd like to associate with a tab. We've named these layouts "Tab1" through "Tab4". You can change these names later, but for now, it is important that they are names this way... you'll see why below. To make things easier, we've also remove the header and footer from each of these 4 layouts.
3. Create a File Reference. Place Thing and CC Tabs next to each other, in the same filder, or in the same location on your machine or server. You'll begin by creating a new file reference in Thing. Select File / Define / File Reference from the menu bar. On the Define File References screen click "New" and then "Add File"; you'll then go locate your copy of CC Tabs. Remember, CC Tabs and Thing should already be placed "next to each other", in the same relative position to each other as they will have when you serve or use your files.
4. Add a Table Occurrence. Next, we'll add a table occurrence for CCtabs in the Relationship Graph for Thing. In Thing, open Define / Database and move to the relationships tab. In the lower left, click the green plus sign to begin creating a new Table Occurrence. When you're asked which table to use, you'll change the "file:" selection from "current file" to CCtabs and then click OK. You don't have to make any relationship lines between CCtabs and Thing. You do, however, have to rename the table occurrence "Tabs" (you can change this later). FileMaker associates items by name, so if your table occurrence is named Tabs, you can paste whole layouts from CC Tabs without any trouble, as the layout objects will be using the same table occurrence names in the two files. Again, after you've completed all these steps, you can return to Thing and change the name of that table occurrence.
5. Copy and Paste. Having done all this prep work, you can now go to the Tab1 layout in CCtabs.fp7 and enter layout mode, select the whole layout, and copy it. You can then paste it in to the Tab1 layout of Thing. If you enter browse mode in Thing at this point, the layout should look exactly like it does in CCtabs, with all the graphics, and tab names having "found" themselves based on the table occurrence names. If any objects appear missing you've likely mis-named the table occurrence in Thing. If everything looks good, test Tab 4 by clicking on it. It should take you to the Tab4 layout in Thing (that layout will be blank, but we want to make sure the tabs are finding their layout names). If that works, manually return to the Tab1 layout in Thing and test each of the other tabs. If they all work you know that you can confidently paste each of the other 3 layouts from CCtabs into Thing. If one of them doesn't work, it is likely that one of your layout names in Thing does not match a layout name in CCtabs.
6. Copy and Paste the Remaining Layouts. Once everything is working above, you can copy and paste the remaining tab layouts from CCtabs to Thing. Once you've done that, you're done, and you can now navigate around Thing using your new tabs.
Next Steps. Now that you have this working, you can create additional sets of 4 tabs which do other things (you may need 4 tabs for your contacts section, and another 4 tabs for your invoicing section). Simply create 4 additional tab name fields in CCtabs and, when you duplicate your layouts in Thing, reassign the tab name fields to use the second set of 4 names. You can also do this with the icons if you want. As this point you can also rename the layouts and table occurrences in thing; now that the layout elements are "in" Thing, they'll respect changes to these names.
Alternate Approaches. The method described above leaves you with two files in your solution, CCtabs.fp7 and Thing.fp7 If you want to have only 1 file, you'll take a slightly different tack for steps 3 and 4. At the end of step 4, you'll still want a table occurrence called Tabs, but it can be from a table in Thing instead of a table in CCtabs.fp7. To do this, you'll create a new table in Thing called Tabs and add to it all the field definitions from CCtabs, copying the field names exactly as they are in CCtabs. You'll then paste in all the data from CC tabs (or import it from CCtabs to Thing if you think that is easier). You can then perform the copy and paste steps in 5 knowing that the field and layout names will resolve properly.
Enjoy!
Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:14 pm