Respect the Inspector – The Philadelphia FileMaker User Group
Recently I was tasked with converting an existing FileMaker 11 solution to FileMaker 12. As is often the case, the conversion was quick and painless and the solution just plain worked as expected in FileMaker 12. However, I noticed something strange about the pop-up menus on some of the layouts. Many (not all) of the menus appeared to be blank although they actually had values selected. If I clicked on the menu, I could see the list of values to choose from, and the existing data was checked. But if I released the menu, all I could see was the blank box.
“Hmmm. Ok. That’s weird,” I thought. So I went into layout mode and placed a new field on the layout, formatted it as a pop-up menu, and selected the same value list to see if that resolved the issue. When I went back into browse mode I was surprised to see that the new fresh field still didn’t show me that there was something selected in the field. I returned to layout mode and added a plain field, without the menu. Back in browse mode I could see the number that was in the field. The data was definitely there.
Next I checked the Value List to see how it was set up. Everything looked good. It was a list that had the key as the first field and a description as the second field, with only the second field showing to the user. I looked at other Value Lists as well and they were all set up the same way. Some were displaying correctly on the layouts and others were not.