Use the Layout Setup dialog

- [Voiceover] Once you've created layouts in Filemaker, there are a couple of different things you can do to change some of the behaviors. You'll notice, if you go into layout mode on the customer's layout, you'll see that there is a little pencil icon next to the layout drop-down. If you select that, you're going to see the layout setup dialogue. I'm going to give you a quick little tour of what some of these settings are. The first couple that you're going to see here are the name of the layout, which you can change in the style log if you want to, and also the ability to include in the layout dropdown. That means in the layout dropdown menu in browse mode.

We'll talk about that in a later movie. You can also see what the context of your layout is, or what records you're showing. I like to refer to this as the context because this is the table that the layout is based off of. Now, these options down here are kind of interesting. Save record changes automatically. That's the default behavior in Filemaker, which allows you to make changes to the data in your database, and to not prompt the user with a save. Now, some developers and some users, for that matter, get a little nervous about that.

So, when you turn this off, and then save your changes onto the layout, you'll see that when users click into the field, when they want to commit the change, now they'll get prompted to save the change, don't save, or cancel, for example. So, that might be reassuring to some users. It's not default behavior, but you can turn that on in the layout setup dialogue. Also, show field frames when record is active. That's the behavior that you're probably used to already.

When you click into a record, you notice these dotted frames around it. You can even see this record here is active. That's what we're talking about when we talk about showing the field frames when the record is active. If you don't like that behavior, you can uncheck this option. Now, the delineate fields on current record only option will be off by default on form layouts like the one that you're looking at here. But, if we close this window and navigate over to the product list, for example, we'll see that that option is on by default on all list views.

So, what does that do? Well, if we dismiss the window for a moment, and we see here that we've got all the fields on our product list layout have this highlight applied to them. So, if we go into browse mode, what you'll notice is that only the selected record actually shows the highlight option. That's really what that setting does there. So, if you go into delineate fields on current record only, and you take that off, which is the behavior that we see in form views.

You'll notice that it gets applied to everything. So, the idea in list views is that you might want to only highlight selected or active records, and that's why this option is available to us. The custom menus, I've mentioned that briefly in this course, but it's outside the scope of this course. If you're interested in more information on this, you'll need a copy of Filemaker Pro Advanced. It allows you to modify the menus across the top of the screen. Enabled quick find will cover in the finding data section. So, let's move over to views. So now, we're going to list view in this case, so you'll notice that only the list view option is chosen.

Normally, if you go back to, let's say, the customer's layout, and we go into browse mode, we'll notice that there's these three icons here. Each of these three icons is available to us. This is the table view. This is the list view. And this is the form view. And you can also access those under the view menu. Now, we see all of those available to us because this was one of the default layouts that was created when we created the table in the first place. But if you use the layout builder tool, it will intelligently disable some of these options for you.

So, if you go back into layout mode, and we hit the pencil icon again to bring up the layout setup, we see views. We can go in here and say, Well, this is designed just to look at one record at a time, which is a form or a detail view, so I'm going to disable this view and disable table view. And, I'm going to make sure that we go to the form view by default. So, let's look at what that behavior looks like. Saving our changes. Now we see that those options are greyed out, both on the toolbar, and you see that they're greyed out on the menu as well. So, this way we can go into form views, and list views if we want to, and make sure that users are only seeing them in their optimal view.

Now, you'll also notice that there's a table view, and table view has some properties here. Table view is that spreadsheet looking view, which by design does not have any parts along the top. So, we can have a header or top navigation parts up here if we want to. And, we can either allow the users to resize columns, which is by default, or not allow them. You'll also notice that one of these is the default option. So, I like to go through all my list views and only allow them to be viewed in list, and make that the default, than go through all the form views or detail views, and do the same thing for them, but with the form view.

So, layout setup dialogue allows you to modify many of the settings for existing layouts, and set defaults based on the type of layout that you designed, so that users can view the data as you intended, without being able to accidentally make changes to the layout while working on it.