I had this same situation for medical articles. I decided to make the extra fields to provide the author(s), journal, title, name of file, a main topic (diabetes, eating disorders), and a subtopic checklist that describes the type of medical article.
Charlene From: FileMaker Pro Discussions [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard S. Russell Sent: Saturday, May 09, 2009 12:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What's in That Container Field? On 2009 May 8, at 19:57, Rick O'Quinn wrote: Richard, One other trick that might get you closer to "what you see is what you get" in the container field is viewing it in a web portal. If the files are stored as a reference AND they are in a web-friendly format like a pdf or jpeg, you could create a url to them and display it in a web portal. Then you'd actually see the file. Don't think it would work for a word or excel file though. Just a thought... And an intriguing one it is. But it would be overkill for what I need. My client doesn't need the documents to open automatically upon going to the record, the way the web viewer works. What I WOULD like to provide her with is some quick visual cue as to whether she CAN open the file by double-clicking on it, or if she's going to have to use the "Export" button I've provided her with. The former works for stored references, the latter for stored files, and you can't tell just by looking at the container field which is which. (In fact, now that I think about it, I can probably set up that "Export" button to simply open the file regardless of how it's stored. Hmm, thanks for sending my brain down this pathway.)
