WebDirect 18 bugs: fixed in 19?

Questions
1

I've been lurking for a bit, looks like a nice forum, my first post.

Using WebDirect 18 with Safari 14 on iOS, I'm seeing some bugs and issues. I'm not sure if these are due to WD18 or Safari or what, but I'm curious if anyone else has seen these, and if they happen to be fixed in FileMaker Server 19 WebDirect?

  • Scrolling is jerky: on a tall layout on my iPad on mobile Safari, I can't smoothly scroll. The screen blanks out and seems to jerk around. The same layout works fine on desktop Safari. It also works fine when using desktop Safari in Responsive Design mode to simulate an iPad.
  • Tab failures: sometimes Tab goes to the previous field on iOS. I notice that if the iOS keyboard has the Shift key highlighted, this seems to trigger it, but it's sporadic.
  • Clicking on a field does not bring up the keyboard. You have to click a second time to get the iOS keyboard to show. I have "Select entire contents on entry" checked.

Possibly relevant:

  • The layout is using a modern Theme, but it was converted from a Classic theme.
  • The layout is pretty simple: text fields, a few buttons, one Button Bar, one Popover

Edit to add:

  • is there a WebDirect 19 release notes? Claris has pretty good "what's new" notes for FM Pro and FM Server, but I've never seen anything detailing WebDirect changes.
3 Likes
2

Hi Xochi and welcome to the soup.

Rather a quick reply without directly referencing the points you raised, but I believe relevant non the less.

We are shortly to rollout a WebDirect manufacturing module on to a factory floor. Hardware is still being discussed, hence we’ve been testing on Android, IOS and Windows.

Regardless of the (tough) hardware settled upon, we will be using Chrome as we had too many problems with Safari on IOS. The main issue was, from memory, a constant recurring connection message, whereas Chrome ran the system fine.

We have made many design tweaks to try to identify the Safari issues, but finally decided Chrome was the easiest solution to the problem.

Kind regards
Andy

1 Like
3

Sounds like a decent compromise, but my webDirect is public facing so I can't really restrict based on browser to that degree.

I've re-worked a couple layouts so they fit on a single iPad screen, and this fixes almost all the issues. It really seems to be something specific to scrolling on the iPad which causes trouble.

4

Back to my original question: has anyone seen a change list for web direct 19, or noticed any improvements in real life?

5

I don't know what's the current development plan, but at least couple years ago total rewrite of webdirect was on the radar. There was at least one major feature that came on 19: Card Window.

Making web direct efficient, fast and usable would be more important feature than fm go for android imho. Probably the biggest UX issues now in web direct are session handling (re login is slow and cumbersome), lack of browser history (= no change in url when changing layout etc) to support back and fwd buttons of browser.

6

That’s a good point about card windows. That suggests there was some work done on the JavaScript engine. I should give 19 a try.