Modular FileMaker – List and Record Detail on Same Layout

Todd Giest has updated his MasterDetail post at Modular FileMaker up to 2.0.  Master Detail allows you to display a list of records in a portal on a layout, and when you select a a record in the portal, shows the details for that record without changing layouts.  This new version shows the the records in the portal in the same orders as the found set in the current table.  He is using a virtual table technique to find and display the records in the portal.

Note the comments on the original article to make the demo work correctly:

This a major update to Master Detail 1.0.

Use Case

MasterDetail was designed with one main use case in mind.  I wanted the current found set of records to be displayed in the portal in the order that they appeared in the found set. I wanted to have it behave as much as possible like regular old FileMaker,  just display the found set in  portal.  I think it does that pretty well.

However there are some limitations. Its not going to perform well on large found sets when the file is hosted on a remote server.  Anything more than a few thousand records is going to bog down.  Thats why I added the feature to automatically constrain the found set.

Some people may want to use Perform Script On Server (PSOS) to get around this issue. But it won’t work.  The found set is local to the client, not the server. When you call a script with PSOS, it won’t know anything about the local clients found set.

You could certainly extend Master Detail to use other record gathering techniques like SQL, or PSOS, but they would require more work and not be as generally applicable as it is out of the box.

Pretty slick demo.

MasterDetail 2.0 – Modular FileMaker.

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