Mar

6

Related Records List Update – Part Two

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Let’s talk a little more about self-referencing relationships. As shown in Simon’s tutorial with the Cycling Library, dragging a Library onto itself can be quite useful. It’s a great way to display a custom set of records at once from the same Library without having to create any Collections and combining a Form design with a Table. Play with it and I’m sure you’ll find that possibility to be a great option at your disposal.
Two examples: in Address Book you could have all your Tennis buddies displayed at once whenever you look at the record of a player.
In a listing of sports race results you could display all races to date.

Next I want to explain the two extra buttons that Bento 2 added to the bottom of the Related Records List Field. On the left side one button was added with a little arrow in it. When you select a record and click that button, Bento takes you to the actual record (form view) in the source Library. You can stay there as long as you wish, browsing and editing, but you can return to the Library (and the exact record) where you came from by clicking on the extra arrow button that appears on top of the window next to the browse arrows. Try it out, it’s very convenient and helpful.

The other new button was added to the right bottom, next to the summary row button. When you click it, the fields display (below the Bento Library pane) flips to display only the fields of the source Library. Now you can check and uncheck fields you want or don’t want displayed in the Related Records List Field. Another very useful new feature.

Next week, in the last installment of this update, we’ll discuss relational loops.

Mar

4

Customizing Themes – Getting to the brink…

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… of starting to alter themes. Sorry, one more preparation article, next week we’re actually changing fonts and you can then use your new theme right away!

First, duplicate the themPack file we looked at last week, so we always have access to our test file. You can rename the duplicate to anything you want – its name has nothing to do with its functionality, so you can rename it again later.

I want to stress two things before we continue. I had added a special note to last week’s article, so in case you missed it: all this only works in Bento 2.
Secondly, this hack does not alter the Bento program file in any way, just individual theme bundles, and you should always work with duplicates, so not to change the original themes.

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Feb

27

Related Records List Update – Part One

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I’m starting another weekly series. The premise: almost a year ago, Simon wrote a great tutorial about an advanced feature of Bento: the Related Records List Fields.
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do. I would like to summarize and clarify some things and also update the usage of the fields with the added features in Bento 2.

First let’s review the basics: if you simply create a one-way link between two Libraries, you HAVE to add any related records to the list by hand. Nothing will be filled in automatically through any other action you take. Bento 2 did not change that functionality.
In addition, another question just came up: what if I create a self-referencing relationship (e.g. dragging Address Book onto itself)? Technically, we’re dealing with only a single library, so you still have to add records manually to the Related Records List Field.

You can create Related Records List Fields in Libraries AND Collections. Be careful about using Smart Collections as related records source, they can trick you. Besides limited functionality (you can’t add new records manually to the source), records can also disappear if you change the criteria. We’ll talk more about Smart Collections when we’ll discuss relational loops.

Update: Simon reminded me that Bento 1 did not even allow Smart Collections as sources for a Reletated Records List Field. So that is another Bento 2 enhancement.

Feb

25

Customizing Themes – Part One

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I saw many complaints in the Bento forum about the built-in themes. Our friend Patrick created the first custom themes called Neutral. BentoUsers featured them prominently (see Themes category). Then I offered my own Theme Creation service. No one was really interested – I know that was because people hate to take advantage of me…

So here is a tutorial for the do-it-yourselfer so no one has to ask anyone for help anymore. Works only in Bento 2 !

Warning: this is not for the faint-hearted because it’s a (legal) hack. For that reason please only proceed at your own risk.

After the whole tutorial has been published I might make it available as a PDF.

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Jul

20

Tracking Hours

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Many Bento users want to create a time-recording system of some type. This may be for something such as billing customers, tracking hours contributed by volunteers or monitoring employees. Although these are all slightly different the core functionality is the same and this article will explore some of the various options available.
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