Please don't mess with my Status Toolbar

OttoDeploy
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@toddgeist and team, I’d like to ask that you consider changing OttoDeploy to not hide the Status Toolbar at line 28 of its OnFirstWindowOpen script. Alternatively, give your users an alternative, and/or tell me what I’m missing in the following explanation.

As far as I can tell, FileMaker has a long-standing bug where any hosted solution file that f’s with my Status Toolbar, fubars it for me permanently. As revealed by the letter ‘f’ count of in the previous sentence, I find it unforgivably bad form for an app to mess with my environment behind my back. OttoDeploy is a developer tool. Developer’s shouldn’t need other developers to hide their toolbars for them. In my frustration, I’ve done a fair bit of experimenting to figure out how to get my toolbar customization to stick as I move between hosted solution files. What I’ve found is that if any file ever hides my toolbar, the next time I show it, the toolbar will have reverted to the default config.

Of course, I simply commented out that line in my copy of OttoDeploy. But, I assume the next time I do the quick-update, my modification will be lost, and I’ll have to go through the whole close file, download, fix my toolbar, upload, routine again.

I’d love to hear that I’ve missed something because this toolbar routine has been a “death by a thousand paper cuts” kind of annoyance for a very long time.

Thanks for listening,
-Mike

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Hi Mike,

Sorry, I have never heard of the problem you are describing. Maybe if you could record and share a video of the issue it might help.

If anybody else reading could confirm or give some more information that might help also

In OttoDeploy, we hide the toolbar for a very good reason. The UI is entirely in the web viewer. We manage the found set and the record you are on. There is no forward or back, no records to navigate. None of the controls up there make any sense for the UI we have built.

I have been hiding the tool bar since the late 90s. I don’t remember ever really having a problem with it.

Happy to hear from others.

Todd

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There is a known bug in current FM that will not save the customized tool bar, in browse mode.

There was a prior bug that reset when switching to layout / browse but they fixed it in layout mode but not in browse mode. I have also noticed that opening up a lot of files the toolbar may or may not be reset per file.

1 Like
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Ah maybe I never see it because I never customize the toolbar.

Todd

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@OceanWest yes, the recent FM update apparently fixed toolbar customization in all modes for some people, but not others. Even on our team, it’s working for some, but still broken in Browse Mode for some of us. Sounds like it’s working for Claris, so they are having a hard time nailing down the scenarios that make it fail.

None of our solutions hide the toolbar and I still have this issue. So I’m guessing @mike’s fury, although just, is misdirected at OttoDeploy, where it is actually a Claris FM bug.

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Thanks so much for sharing your experiences (and non-experiences haha) with the toolbar @OceanWest and @flybynight and @toddgeist.

We develop about 20 in-house solutions with 3 Windows servers running 19.x and 2 Linux Servers running the latest release. Three of us devs always run the latest FMP on macOS.

About 90% of our solutions deployment is as FiAS “native” apps via MDM and Apple Enterprise licensing for iPads. The other 10% is WebDirect to administrative folks’ Windows desktops.

We’re an FDA-regulated manufacturer. So, our software environment is well-controlled and the mix is pretty unique in that we actually have zero users running the FileMaker client app.

I’m sharing this as background on why I’m quite aware of how, when, and why to hide the status toolbar. No end user here has EVER seen it. In fact, on WebDirect, in addition to hiding it in our OnOpen script, we check the box in File Options, which IIRC is the only way to prevent it from showing as the page begins to load.

The nice thing about all that is it frees us devs to customize it for our own use DURING DEVELOPMENT. In my case, I show the Manage button, Debugger, and Data Viewer buttons.

@flybynight , interesting about your shop’s findings. In my case, I’m 100% confident in what I said in the OP. About a week ago, after seeing it mentioned in a recent release note, I did some thorough testing and found the culprit that fubars a customized toolbar. If you open ANY hosted solution file that (rudely, haha) hides your toolbar then the next time you open ANY solution, you’ll find that your customizations are lost. In my testing, this and only this (having it hidden on you), is what fubars toolbar customization.

In our environment, we can easily avoid this OnOpen, by not messing with the user’s environment if we see Full Access or even macOS. That is, UNLESS the solution is built for WebDirect in which case that ticked File Option trips us up.

I hope this helps ya’ll in some way at some point. Even better, I hope Claris fixes this for reals soon. Haha.

Have a wonderful day!
-Mike

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@mike thanks for sharing your experience as well. I just did some testing bouncing around modes, and the Toolbar reverts to defaults for me with no hiding going on, so that isn’t the only circumstance that it happens. I say that not to invalidate your experience at all… but just to add that the behavior seems inconsistent, and that’s why it’s a hard bug to nail down.

If you are on the Claris community, please add your experience to this thread: Claris Community (English)

Thanks and good luck. It’s frustrating for sure!
-Shawn

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Ooh! Thanks for sharing that. I haven’t seen it fail just by switching modes. If I get a chance, I’ll test that more thoroughly. Frankly, since the dawn of the toolbar, I’ve never been satisfied with how it handles the differences between Browse and Layout modes and just stuck to using and modifying it in Browse mode ONLY. Turns out I may have overstated the thoroughness of my tests. Haha.

Heading over to the community now. :pray:

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@flybynight , I posted in the thread. Was kinda weird (maybe some kinda AI-based auto-reply?) but, one minute after I posted, James Tussey posted what I read as confirmation from Claris that they’ve identified the issue to be exactly what I said, nothing more, nothing less, and they’re asking anyone who sees other scenarios to provide steps to reproduce.

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I saw that. I don’t think it’s AI, LOL… but I’m guessing they have some canned responses for issues like this where they are aware of an issue.

Of course, I can’t get it to do it now… so I don’t have a “repeatable” scenario for them. But hopefully fixing that issue will help us all!