ISO FileMaker Magazine

What do the following have in common? Products with component parts, generations of people, complex study topics with prerequisites and a chain of historically related events. Yep, you guessed it, it's a hierarchy of things. Something which comes before another thing and are somehow tied together.

Within any database system, this is easily accomplished with two simple fields. Yet, facilitating the navigation of the content can be accomplished in a number of ways. One of the more common methods for moving up or down any hierarchy is to use what are known in the UI world as breadcrumbs.

When your number of levels is beyond two, you can implement breadcrumbs into your user interface and provide a lot of UI coherence. In this video, we walk through the data structure as well as what's required to use FileMaker's tab panels in order to accomplish this task in the most efficient manner. If you're taking users down (and up) any hierarchy, then you need to know how to use this technique! This video and the technique file will provide you with all the know-how and code to get it done.

What's truly great about FileMaker Pro is that you can have 5 different developers come up with 5 different ways of doing the exact same thing. There are, however, some pieces to a puzzle which will inevitably require the same structure or settings.

Breadcrumbs, for example, work infinitely better within a Tab Panel object than any other object type in FileMaker. This is because tab panels provide the feature of shrinking to fit their content.

But, when it comes to the implementation of the logic and feature set, you can use any of the supported technologies which FileMaker provides. You can use ExecuteSQL() or you can just use a simple $$GLOBAL.VARIABLE. The limits of what you can do are extended even further when you consider newer technologies such as FileMaker's support for using JSON.

By integrating a Breadcrumb solution by using JSON to manage what and how those breadcrumbs should work, you arrive at a wonderfully powerful breadcrumb solution. And, that is exactly what this video is about.