Tips and Tricks: Self Tooltipping Fields in Filemaker 10

(Editor’s Note:  Here’s the first post from Chad.  I’m monkeying with how to display author names in WordPress, but until then, you’ll have to live with a stupid Editor’s Note.)

Anyone with the dream of being able to show field comments as the tooltip, there finally is an answer.

In previous versions of Filemaker it was possible to grab the field comments on a layout for a tooltip, but only by hard-coding the name of the field in the tooltip.  This makes managing the tooltip a little cumbersome, you’d have to touch every field and give it an unique tooltip if so inclined.  In that case you might as well manage the text of the tooltip on the layout object. 

You’d need to put:

FieldComment ( Get ( FileName ) ; "Ship_Date" )

A couple of new functions now make this a lot easier, potentially inserting a single tooltip into all fields on all the layouts across your system, and then editing them in a centralized location.  The first is the Self function, introduced in Filemaker 9, and now the GetFieldName () function.

When editing a field definition, you can add comments to the field like so:

 

Then, in layout mode you can select one or more fields and enter this as a tooltip:

FieldComment ( Get ( FileName ) ; GetFieldName ( Self  ) )

And now when you mouse over the comments appear.