ISO FileMaker Magazine

When FileMaker simply can't do what's needed natively, you resort to pulling out the old web viewer and just doing it there. Yes, learning JavaScript may be something you're resistant to - or - maybe you've fully embraced the maximum extent of the power we have access to. Either way, there are many things JavaScript can do better and all we need is to move the data back and forth between the web viewer and our fields.

When it comes to a truly natural feeling of drag and drop with lists, your only option is the web viewer and JavaScript. Fortunately, using a library named Sortable, we can easily support a very natural drag and drop experience. Sortable provide an extremely wide array of features in terms of any kind of drag and drop you might want to offer within FileMaker.

This video, and it's supporting technique file, will provide you with the starting point of how you can use Sortable within your solution in order to achieve that desired natural drag and drop experience.

As a long-time developer, I can certainly say that FileMaker development has advanced quite significantly over the past decade. However, I can also say that FileMaker was never developed from the ground up to have a highly robust event model. The bolt-on method of supporting events through script triggers never really planned on having too much support for drag-n-drop between various layout objects.

Fortunately, there are a number of little tricks you can apply with your knowledge of how the FileMaker client works. And, within this knowledge, you can accomplish some really cool features within your FileMaker solution. In this video, I present a wonderful solution to a problem one of our subscribers was having with trying to support a method of drag-n-drop between portals and allowing for the groupings of various people within the context of a specific event.

If you'd like to know more about how to take advantage of drag-n-drop within FileMaker, then you'll find a number of valuable tidbits in this video.