I'm trying to implement Osbornes Invisibility trick to show either a set
of fields inside a portal if adding a new contact or another set of
fields inside another portal with a drop down list if the user wants to
make a new record for a person already in the system. Persons are stored
in a related Individual DB.

On the layout I have a radio box connected to a Global with the
alternative values "New Person" and "Existing Person". Toggling this box
does indeed hide and show the different areas. When the selection have
been made, the radiobox portal itself is hidden to make impossible the
user goes back and forth as that could mean he would inadvartently edit
an existing record he thought was new. No problem so far.

However, the existing person area have a filter field and another portal
inside that shows filtered names based on the value in the filter field.
My problem is that results will often be more than the 3 I allowed to
show, so I need to display scroll bars. However, if I do display those,
they'll show even if the rest of the content inside the existing person
area doesn't nor does the filtered names portals content.

Does this mean scrollbars are incompatible with Osbornes Invisibility
trick ?


Respectfully
Michael

>
> Does this mean scrollbars are incompatible with Osbornes Invisibility
> trick ?

If I read your question correctly -- and forgive me, it's the end of a long
week -- then the answer is yes and no. You can use the scrollbars, but
you'll have to tolerate them being visible when you have fewer than 3 fields
visible.

Is that what you meant?

B

Michael Bystroem <michaellastname@mac.com> wrote:

> Does this mean scrollbars are incompatible with Osbornes Invisibility
> trick ?

FYI, just because you found it on J. M. Osborne's website doesn't mean
it's "his" trick. He's great at compiling hint files, and he does clever
things with text parsing, but he's not the originator of a great many of
the techniques on his site.

Lynn Allen
www.semiotics.com
562.938.7890 

Mimi <essayhelp@rogers.com> wrote:

> You can use the scrollbars, but
> you'll have to tolerate them being visible when you have fewer than 3
> fields visible.
OK, this I can't tolerate, so I choose a popup list instead of a portal.
Or did you mean I can put very small fields on there and they will go
away?

> Is that what you meant?
I didn't know the scrollbar wouldn't disappear with fewer than 3 fields
visible. But yeah, I think you got the idea what I was talking about. 

Lynn allen <lynn@NOT-semiotics.com> wrote:

> FYI, just because you found it on J. M. Osborne's website doesn't mean
> it's "his" trick. He's great at compiling hint files, and he does clever
> things with text parsing, but he's not the originator of a great many of
> the techniques on his site.

OK, I found the reference to this technique on this list, so that's why
I called it "Osbornes".

Anyway, I choosed the popup list instead, but that route have other
problems. See my post "Using "*" in filtered relations".