I came across this this about 6 months ago in a conversation with Kevin Frank. Then, I promptly forgot about it. I stumbled on it again today, and thought "Wow, this is cool. I need to tell somebody."

Since FM7, we have been able to set whether or not FileMaker automatically saves changes to a record or not. This is a layout option

Anytime the user does anything that will commit the record, this dialog comes up.

This was cool, but, in my opinion, mostly unusable. If the user clicked on the background of the layout the dialog was triggered as well. There was no way to keep the record open until the user was finished making all the changes. So this feature went under-used.

Well with FileMaker 9 you can stop the user from being able to click on the background. The first attempts at this used buttons as a background objects. This worked, sort of, but is very ugly. The trick I am talking about today is to use a web viewer as a background object. To completely lock down the solution you will need to use a paused script or a plug-in that will stop the user from quitting the application.

I think this tip would work even better inside the Loop-Pause design pattern. Maybe I will work up a demo on that next.

Download the demo file (at the end of the post) for more info.