Filemaker Theme Packs

When you drop into Layout Mode, what do you see? If you haven’t done much design work on your FileMaker database in the last four years, you may still be rocking the Classic theme. That’s a bad thing, because object styles are all defined locally. That means a lot of unnecessary data being loaded for each layout, and a lot of busy work achieving a unifying look.

Goes into more of the details if you’re interested.Since FileMaker 13, Themes and Styles are available that make building a well designed, professional looking application with FileMaker easier and more efficient. Styles are pre-defined formats that can be applied to layout objects like fields, buttons, etc. Themes are collections of coordinated styles for a specific purpose like printing, mobile devices, or desktop display. FileMaker provides some guidance for using themes and styles in their.

Themes and styles make it easier to globally change the look of an app across the solution similar to how themes work in PowerPoint or Keynote.As a best practice at LuminFire, we use a custom theme based on the Enlightened FileMaker theme for fmIgnite Pro and it’s availabe in the free solution. You may want to download and open fmIgnite Starter to follow along.We use three distinct themes, based on the type of layout:. fmIgnite – Desktop/laptop work. fmIgnite Touch – Mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad using FileMaker Go. fmIgnite Print – Printing reportsThose other custom themes you may have noticed in the list are experiments. Don’t ask about our “Rose Gold” effort.;) The image saved in the Preview part is generated from the top/left 368×306 pt section of whatever layout you last saved the theme on.We maintain a layout devoted to listing and displaying all theme styles.

Here’s a quick video showing all of the styles:Selecting a text object on a layout and showing the Styles inspector (shown on the right) will reveal a host of Text styles to choose from. Each one is prefixed with “TX” (short for “text”). Below is a complete list of all prefixes we use in the fmIgnite theme:.

Filemaker Theme Packs List

TX – text. EB – edit box. DC – drop-down calendar. DL – drop-down list. PM – pop-up menu.

CB – checkbox set. RB – radio button set. CR – container. BN – button. BB – button bar. PO – popover button.

TC – tab control panel. SC – slide control panel. PL – portal. LN – line. SH – shape (rectangle, rounded rectangle or oval). CH – chart.

WV – web viewer. BG – background. PT – layout partA proper naming convention is helpful just to keep things straight.

The prefixes are critical because if you try to name a Text style as “test”, and then try to name a Edit Box style as “test”, you’ll run into this error message:Upgrading from Classic to a modern theme, especially in a large system, is no small undertaking. Whether you choose to use one of FileMaker’s built-in themes, build your own, or try out ours (from ), you’re going to need to apply it to every layout in your system and fix issues that occur. Updating navigation and other UI elements at the same time to advantage of new features like button bars, vector icons, and popovers is also wise.

Filemaker Pro 13

This all takes time but resulting combination of a modern look and feel, increased performance, and ease of future development/maintenance has a much quicker return on investment than most people realize. Can’t find the time?

We’d love to help you upgrade the theme in your system, just for a free consultation.

As you add complexity to your custom app, it becomes important to also streamline your work in the app whenever possible. The themes and styles in FileMaker Pro Advanced offer an opportunity to make improvements to the usability of your app’s layouts in one area, then easily apply those changes across the rest of the app.Styles in FileMaker Pro Advanced are a set of formatting preferences that can be automatically applied to layout objects. You can apply a style to more than one object so when you change the style, all those objects are updated at the same time. Similarly, themes are sets of styles that can be applied to more than one layout.When you customize a theme and save your changes, all the layouts that use the theme are updated together. If you change your mind about how to format field labels, for example, you can make that change in one place and see it applied consistently throughout your app.

Filemaker Templates Free

During this lesson, you’ll create new styles and save them to your app’s theme. You’ll also combine a new calculation with a sub-summary part to make a list layout easier to scan.