Formula worked an hour ago, not now

[santafestan]

Fumbling through a Form with some Text fields to summarize data. Worked great an hour ago; just opened the DB up and 4 fields are $0.

Simple formulas like this: pattern(aggregate(Price, “sum”, {PriceGroup = “1”}),“$#,”)

BTW, there is a lot of variant info here and in other help venues about quotes or chevrons or curly brackets, or nothing. Nothing works pretty well if you have one-word field names. But that isn’t what is wrong here. I don’t know what is wrong. The pattern bit doesn’t matter either, if I take it out.

Possibility is the PriceGroup field. It was numeric, but I changed it to text to make it work an hour ago. Just a simple digit code of 1, 2, 3, or 4.

Again, it worked fine an hour ago, and doesn’t now.

While I’m here, is there a simple way to make the Form display nice big text, like the zoom in the graphic mode? I could change the fonts to 36 pt, I suppose, but the Data mode doesn’t have a zoom

Also, is there a snap to grid setting? I just need a bunch of data to print out a screenshot of for occasional meetings, nothing fancy, but I like things neatly aligned, and going up into the Objects > Align > … gets tiresome.

While I’m here … there doesn’t seem to be an update or refresh button/function in a form with just a bunch of basic, simple text display fields.

[admin]

@santafestan

pattern(aggregate(Price, “sum”, {PriceGroup = “1”}),“$#,”)

From the help page for the aggregate( function:

Emphasis: The formula must be quoted

If the formula is not quoted, that would mean that the formula was inside the Price field. Obviously the Price field doesn’t contain a formula. So the correct formula is

pattern(aggregate({Price}, “sum”, {PriceGroup = “1”}),“$#,”)

@santafestan

there is a lot of variant info here and in other help venues about quotes or chevrons or curly brackets, or nothing

That’s because the necessity for quotes varies on the context. Also, quotes and chevrons are completely different things, for different purposes.

@santafestan

I could change the fonts to 36 pt, I suppose

That’s the ticket.

is there a snap to grid setting?

Sorry, no.

there doesn’t seem to be an update or refresh button/function in a form with just a bunch of basic, simple text display fields

Huh?

I do wonder if you might want to check out the automatic form construction system. Sounds like it might make your life a lot simpler.

Automatic Form Construction

[santafestan]

Thanks … one more question. There is a Window > Magnify > 150% [etc.] menu tree option that I don’t find as a setting or procedure option. Am I missing something here? Another thing I’d like to avoid is when I magnify, instead of the data being lodged in the upper left corner of the window, it jumps down and right so I have to scroll back to see the stuff I’m magnifying. Are these things unavoidable in Form data mode? (I may wander off into Keyboard Maestro land …)

[pcnewble]

@admin

is there a snap to grid setting?

Sorry, no.

. . . which is something I, for one, have definitely missed.

[admin]

@santafestan

There is a Window > Magnify > 150% [etc.] menu tree option that I don’t find as a setting or procedure option. Am I missing something here? Another thing I’d like to avoid is when I magnify, instead of the data being lodged in the upper left corner of the window, it jumps down and right so I have to scroll back to see the stuff I’m magnifying.

It sounds like you are thinking of working with the form magnified permanently. I would strongly recommend that what you really want to do is to redesign the form to use the user interface element sizes you want at 100%, i.e. bump up the font sizes.

A big problem with form magnification you haven’t mentioned is that user interface elements like buttons, popup menus, etc. do not scale with the magnification setting. No matter what magnification you use, these will always appear at 100% size, which looks funny when you’ve changed the magnification. These user interface items are displayed by Apple’s code, so this can’t be changed. This could be fixed by completely rewriting these items with our own code, but we decided that it would be more important to maintain 100% Apple compatibility. Because of this, form magnification other than 100% really has only very limited usefulness in Panorama.

[santafestan]

Thanks for the interesting explanation; I figured it might be something like this. Best Practices would strongly suggest I do things differently. However, I am the only person in this case who uses this DB. What I wanted the form for is to have a quick set of summary info for Zoom meetings with a committee. This involves screen-sharing, so I just needed the wee standard form to be about 200% for easy viewing, and for PDF emailing. No buttons and a bare-bones layout for this one purpose. A macro in Keyboard Maestro simplifies the magnification and positioning in window. I still don’t know why a magnified window doesn’t keep upper left as upper left, but I’ll guess that is Apple’s fault. No biggie.

[admin]

@santafestan

No buttons and a bare-bones layout for this one purpose.

For what it’s worth it sounds like it would be very simple and quick to create a second form for this purpose. Just change the <size> tag to 24, 36, etc. and Panorama will instantly create a form with big text for you.

Here’s the link to the help documentation on this:

Automatic Form Construction