FileMaker is great for so many things but there is no native support for drag & drop sorting of portal rows. This is a drawback when portals are such a powerful FileMaker feature, and users expect to see the same kind of drag & drop sort interface they see in other applications.
Over the years different developers have offered different solutions. They worked, but typically had one or more drawbacks – would not work in a separation model, awkward appearance/UI, etc.
Charles Delfs of Delfs Engineering is a different kind of FileMaker developer. He specializes in solving the hardest problems, and is a "developer's developer" in that other FileMaker developers often hire him to solve the problems they can't.
Recently a client asked him to add drag & drop sorting to several portals in a POS solution. After looking at all of the other options out there Charles decided that none of them were good enough. He then proceeded to build the best drag & drop sorting for FileMaker yet.
It is elegant and, with really just one field and one script, easy to implement. It also protect against some of the very common (and extremely dangerous) problems with other drag & drop implementations for FileMaker – like dragging into another text field (not related to the sort) and accidentally erasing the contents.
Demo files that will allow you to add this better drag & drop sort functionality to your own FileMaker solutions is available, free of charge, on the Delfs Engineering website. If you need help implementing or further refining it Delfs Engineering is able to help at very reasonable rates.
This approach to manual sorting is so good that it has also been featured in ISO FileMaker Magazine. They have posted an excellent video demonstrating how it works, and why it is better:
