MrWatson’s Popover Card Window Technique
Smart Card Windows with Popover Positioning Power
Here’s a handy little thing.
For a FileMaker based email client I needed to be able to choose from the list of folders in three different places on the layout to implement the following three functions:
- Display contents of «choose folder» (displayed top right)
- Move an email to «choose folder» (displayed to the right in the record)
- Move all emails to «choose folder» (displayed at the top of column)
The initial solution of a popover for each of these three functions lead to a terrible repetition of a complicated selection portal, so I needed to find a way of centralising the code.
A card window seemed to be the sensible solution - but I didn’t want to lose the intelligent and intuitive positioning of the popover.
The solution was MrWatson’s Popover Card Window Technique.
- A card window whose position is guided by an underlying popover button.
- Simply
- create an empty popover
- trigger a script when the popover appears, and pass the name of the popover object
- read the coordinates of the popover object
- adjust the positioning to taste
- on close window, don’t forget to also close the empty popover