Table view apparently switching to a pie-chart on its own?

[Harriswe]

I have both a Lite version and a Standard version of an application and a while back the Lite version in-line view switched from a table view to a pie-chart. At first I thought I may have accidentally deleted a view, so removed the pie-chart view and replaced it with a table view.

Now it has happened again, this time in the Standard version of the app, unfortunately just before a demonstration and this time I knew I had not changed any views. See screen-shot below.

Both applications run of the same data model. Any idea why an _in line view would switch, apparently on its own?

[Steve · Accepted solution]

The inline view used is chosen from among all the views in the ref position for the inline data set. If you have more than one view in the ref position for the data set, you’ll encounter this very problem.

There’s some sort of preference AppSheet uses to choose which of the available ref views is chosen, but I don’t know what it is. From the behavior you’re seeing, it’s safe to say a chart view is given preference over a table view.

The only way to avoid the problem is to have the desired view as the only ref view for the data set. If you want to display the data using different views, you’ll need to create slices of the same data for the different view types. This becomes very complex very fast, but it seems to be the only way to do it.

[Harriswe]

Hi @Steve,

That did the trick. Do you know if this has been raised as a Bug? Since it appears AppSheet occasionally takes the random decision to display what was once a Table as a Pie-chart?

Thank you once again.

[Steve]

I do not believe it is considered a bug.

[TDhers]

It’s not really random, more based on Heuristics. But this is part of the declarative platform where we keep authoring a simple task by inferring a lot of what we hope to be the most appropriate behavior automatically.
As Steve suggests, you can overwrite this by writing your own drill down views (and slices) but it requires more work on your part to setup everything exactly as you want with no variability.
This is part of the tradeoff of a intent based declarative platform vs a more traditional development platform.
Thierry

[Harriswe]

Hi @TDhers I appreciate the ‘interpretative’ nature of the platform we are using. For sure it offers many benefits. The Pie-Chart view that kept appearing was actually only supposed to be displayed in the dashboard view only. The behaviour was certainly unexpected when the ‘normal’ table view was switched-out for this Pie-Chart view, without having made any recent changes.

Unexpected behaviour of this nature makes the app less user-friendly, having to add rules to try and prevent it happening again, or delete the Pie-Chart view, or write your own drill-down logic.

Thank again.