Building a Visual Progress Tracker in FileMaker
Alexis Allen of Designing FileMaker has a new guest blogger, John Renfrew of attitiude, and his first article is on adding a visually pleasing way to build an automatic progress tracker that provides instant feedback to a client as the project progresses through the process:
Iām pleased to present a guest post from John Renfrew, a developer from attitude, FBA members in Birmingham, England. In it, he talks about one approach to implementing a progress tracker in FileMaker 13 that shows the user where they are in the process, by using the awesome new feature, Hide Object When.
The challenge of designing for FileMaker is like most other software environments: Starting with data and choosing the best way for it to be displayed, while adding meaning and value for the end user. Personally, the challenges I love best are the ones which combine both the scientific and artistic parts of my brain…
For this project we wanted to have the entire process laid out on a single layout, and only show the objects relevant to the stage of the job. In the past something similar might have been achieved in FileMaker using conditional formatting, but that only works for native objects, and I was interested in playing with a favourite new FMP13 feature, Hide Object When.
To enable this we will determine the stage by using a calculation in a field which we will call ProgressIndicator.
Follow the link for all the details, and even a downloadable example file to play with!