Favorites (Bar) Flummoxes FastForms Forms

For those that don’t know, the Favorites Bar is a M2M toolbar, which can be placed anywhere on the screen or docked in various places. It is a convenient way to bring up screens that you use often, and there is a real need for it. There is just one little problem.

It doesn’t work. Well, it does work, but it screws up a multitude of other M2M screens and processes.

To be honest, I don’t know how the Favorites Bar still exists. For awhile, it has been more or less a running joke in support that if a problem is not easily explainable, have the user disable the Favorites Bar and there’s a fair chance the problem will be solved. The screens on the favorites bar are pre-loaded and I believe this is what causes the problems. Since the screens do not initialize the next time they are selected, weird behavior results.

However, because it is so handy, users are going to use it whether you want them to or not. M2M has not provided a way for administrators to disable it, nor seen fit to fix the stupid thing.

Anyway, this particular post is about a FastForms issue I noticed when I customized a screen with a companion form. A companion form loads next to a standard M2M screen to allow the user to enter corresponding information. Some of my users complained that their companion form kept disappearing. I realized through testing that this would happen the second time they loaded the screen. When I disabled the Favorites Bar, everything would work as normal.

According to CR 117770 there is a fix for this particular behavior in version 6.0, but I have yet to test it.