Hello, I am new to this forum and not yet completely familiar with Filemaker, perhaps the question I am asking here has been addressed before.
Being a vinyl enthusiast, I have created a database of my music collection. Each record contains information about the LP and has an image of the corresponding cover. I think it would be nice to create a tile view in the layout based on these images. The list view does not work for this purpose. Is it better to use the form view and if so, how do I set it up? Or should I set it up in a completely different way? Hopefully you can provide me with tips and tricks.
While there is no native layout object tool to build this tile display in FileMaker (which is a real shame!) There are still ways to achieve this through the use of a Web Viewer and Javascript.
The cover images could be stored in a container field (a blob). That can be sized and placed in the list or form view or even a portal
But to create tiles like on a streaming TV service you could use multiple portals and set the starting record for each portal incremented ahead one.
Another alternative would be to create a table with a bunch of container fields. It could even be a virtual list structure with say 7 container fields per record , set in a list view
I agree that this is the sort of thing that seems to be screaming out for a web viewer solution. Lots more snazziness to be had, among various other advantages.
As far as rendering it without a web viewer, I also was thinking about one-row portals, but was, admittedly, concerned about performance. The approach that I was pondering was to use summary parts to group records into rows -- probably not too different from a virtual list approach.
What steps are necessary to refresh the tile screen if the found set changes
Regarding the second question:
If I start omitting records in the tile layout, the display goes bad. Not surprising, but I was hoping that re-running the sort, and maybe some kind of window/portal refresh would make it look nice again. And, yet, I wasn't able to make that happen in the few things that I tried. That said, going back to the form layout, and then re-running the tile view script seems to work, but I was hoping for less.
Edit: Even re-running the tile script doesn't seem to always work when the found set changes. So (at least in v18/MacOS) there seems to be a need to give the portals a good hard kick to get them to refresh.
Edit 2: Using @weetbicks's technique to kick the relationship worked. I had to add one global field to the table, but now the re-renders seem to work as desired. Thirteen years later, I still love that blog post.
