Pill Menu Button Bars
I can’t recall a situation where some technology from the past isn’t superseded by the new technology which replaces it. In the context of FileMaker Pro, a good example of this is your basic button.
Yes, it’s been there ever since FileMaker was created. There never was a FileMaker Pro without the button widget. Enter FileMaker 14 and Button Bars and we now have a lot of possible options. Especially when you combine the Hide object calc which arrived in FileMaker 13. You can control which segments are shown and take advantage of this is various other ways.
In this video, I show you how to make a few minor tweaks to a default Button Bar object in order to streamline one of the available FileMaker templates. It’s a great exercise in optimizing your layouts so you don’t have to copy/paste and manage as many different layout objects. You get all the same results with some added benefits provided by the Button Bar layout widget. If you’ve got a lot of layouts with a lot of buttons all aligned in a row, then this video may have a nice little trick or two when making your design considerations.
Comments
hover
Matt
you can't add a hover state to the blue segment as conditional formatting wins and removes interactive states...
john
True - Conditional formatting wins
If you do need to support the Hover state then sometimes it's a matter of making the initial Active or Inactive state the color you want to show and then having Conditional Formatting remove it. You can also make Conditional Formatting apply the color and a third option is to place an object with the same size below and removing all effects.
In my use of this trick I have found that I'm typically able to make it work out given the options.
But, it certainly would be much nicer if Conditional formatting was expanded to include stroke, gradients and other attributes!
-- Matt Petrowsky - ISO FileMaker Magazine Editor