What triggers a record commit (WebDirect)

Questions
1

I have a WebDirect based ticketing system open to the public. One concern of this system was to reduce the number of empty tickets, which could be caused by bots, or by real people who click into the site and then exit.

I had a pretty good system working using the OnRecordCommit layout script trigger and a script which would read a global variable set to 0 or 1, so that record commits could be fully scripted and controlled.

If a user exited the system, I scripted a Revert Record step before saving, and no new record was created.

It worked fine.

But something or someone (probably me) broke it, and I started getting a bunch of empty / blank records.

Digging into this, I think the problem was that I added some new features (including debug logging) and something about this forced a record commit before I was on the proper layout.

I've fixed it now, but this brought up a question:

What specific events trigger a record commit?

There are many we know about:

  • clicking outside a field
  • navigating to a different record

But other events are less clear - do these trigger Commit events? In WebDirect? Always? or only sometimes?

  • Go To Layout
  • New window
  • New window with a different layout (even if the new window is opened in Card mode)?
  • GTRR
  • switching to browse or preview mode? (what if you are already in that mode?)
  • a commit records step in a different window?
  • etc...

I believe in my case, the inadvertent record commit was due to a Logging script I wrote, which did a bunch of things:

  • created a New Window
  • Entered Browse Mode
  • Go to Layout
  • New Record
  • Set fields
  • Commit Records
  • Close Window

Something about this triggered the record commit in the prior window, and I was never quite sure which step did it.

2

Go to layout will ( if it is a different layout) close the current record.

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3

My experience (using FMPro on Desktop) is that Card Windows do not not trigger a commit, so you can do this:

  • New Window (Card Window)
  • Go to Layout
  • etc.
  • close Window

and the original window is not affected.

I wonder if I edited my WebDirect scripts to use Card Windows, if this would help?

4

That's makes sense for FileMaker on the desktop because the current record could remain open while the card window opens on top of it.

You'd have to check whether WebDirect is able to reproduce that behaviour. WebDirect is amazing but it has it's quirks.

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5

Another (simpler) approach: turn off "save record changes automatically" for this layout.

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6

With 'save record changes automatically' OFF, you still get the automatic saving behavior, but FileMaker adds a confirmation dialog first before it happens.

That might work in some scenarios, and could be useful for debugging (to figure out just which step is triggering the commit) but in this case it's not a usable solution for end users.