Navigational Breadcrumbs
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.
Comments
Navigating back
I was a little confused as I could not actually navigate back through the records to 'Orange' the Root in case I wanted to add new children of the root (ie Orange-yellow).
I added a line at line 26 as follows:
Go to Related Record [ Show only related records ; From Table: "Go To Related » Technique: ; Using layout: <Current Layout> ]
This for me at least makes more sense as to what I was looking at the Drill up doing (taking me back to the record I was previously looking at).
Darrel Farah