Drop Down lists stay dropped after new selection has been made (1 Comment)

Issue report by David Toth

Product

FileMaker Pro

Version

12

Operating system version

Mavericks

Description of the issue

Drop down list edit boxes will stay with the select list dropped after selection. It appears that the behavior is that the field exits properly but immediately returns because there is no valid "next" field for it to go to. I'm new at FM trying to get retrained from Access and it's been a bit of a rough trip and along the way during my learning curve I've probably done some "non-standard" things that caused this issue. I've seen one or two older reports on this forum and Google found a lot of people that seem to have the same issue. I have found nothing in the FM12 documentation that suggests what I've experimentally discovered is the issue.

Steps to reproduce the problem

I don't know how universal this is with other layouts but here is mine. I have a layout based on a main table that has tab controls. On one tab is a portal showing related records from another table. There are only two fields that are not drop-downs and several that are on this portal. By trial and error (and much angst) it appears that the drop-down will stay dropped if either of two conditions are present in the portal. First, there is no other field that is not also a drop-down that is enabled in browse mode to accept user input. The other condition that I unknowing seem to have created is that the the non-drop-down field must have a tab order number set in it. It can'd be cleared.

Expected result

Obviously I wanted the drop-down list to retract when I'd picked something in it. Also, I really don't want a next entry box to be highlighted after a selection in another field's drop-down. I'd prefer that no highlight selection is made. You can do this by clicking outside the portal but I wasn't able to trigger on any portal or field event that duplicated what the mouse click did. Tried to go to named tab control but that didn't work.

Actual result

As stated before all of the 6 drop-down boxes exhibited this behavior. It was frustrating because I had a prior version of this form that worked, but in "cleaning up" my layout I introduced this problem condition, likely by clearing all the tab ordering.

Exact text of any error message(s) that appear

No error messages occurred

Configuration information

See above. I could also recreate this problem by putting a drop-down list text box on another tab of the tab control on the layout (not in a portal). It did the same thing I suppose because there was no other entry-enable field to go to on the tab control.

Workaround

Well the "work around" is to make sure you have some kind of field on the layout that isn't a drop-down list and also has a numbered tab order set. Some Googled problem suggestions including putting a 1x1 pixel invisible box on the layout. However, that didn't seem to work too well for me and besides you still have to set it to some field that you don't mind gets data entered accidentally.
I don't know if this is a "bug" exactly, but it sure was unexpected and annoying. If you can't fix it, please put a warning in your help docs and forum.