Portal row locking “detail” pop-up window
Reprint of a post from May, 2004 before the days of FileMaker 8.x. Might still be a useful reference.
-
I ran into an odd problem while working on my project management
application in FileMaker 7. In one of my views, I have a portal in
which the fields are enterable and editable "inline". You’ll see in my
picture 
that
I have included a button that pops up a small detail window that shows
users more details about that portal row and allows them to edit and
add additional data to that portal row.
The crux of the problem is this. If you are "sitting" in a field in
a portal row and then click the button (the blue plus sign) which does
a "GTRR" (go to related record) of displaying it in a new, smaller
window, you’ll run into a record lock that prevents you from editing
the record in the detail view because the lock from the referring
window hasn’t been released. If, however, we release that lock by
committing the record BEFORE we do our GTRR, we’ll lose the focused
portal row and wind up going to the wrong related record (actually,
always the first related record).
Solution
The idea is to be able to commit our record but still return to our
portal row before doing our GTRR script. This is where script
parameters come to our rescue. 
Pass the Get ( PortalRowNumber ) function as script parameter with that
button. We can now safely commit the record, return to the portal row
by the value of the script parameter and happily do our GTRR.
FileMakery, Part II
In Part I of FileMakery, I argue that FileMaker Pro’s (FMP) value is primarily defined by what it does for working professionals and non-technical users; lose this aspect of FileMaker and the product ceases to be relevant to its user base. FileMaker Pro may not be quite the product that a segment of developers want, but I think that it is exactly the product that a large and traditionally under-served group of users needs.
But let me qualify this a bit. This isn’t a critique about innovation on FileMaker Inc’s (FMI) part. In many ways, the current generation of FileMaker (7/8) is inspired. FMI has done a lot of things right. In all the essential ways, FileMaker Pro is still easy to use, and some would argue that it is even easier now. On top of this, FMI has worked hard to break the technical limitations of the product and to gain credibility among the technical community. FMI appears to have addressed many of the principal IT objections that have threatened to take the product away from the hands of its loyal customers. With the addition of a much improved security framework and serious connectivity features, FMI has made real inroads in convincing IT that it can be a good corporate citizen.