Access to native navigational functions

[Kirk_Masden]

One nice thing about AppSheet is the native navigation. For example, if one reorders a table by tapping on a heading, the detail views that one accesses subsequently all “know” what records come before them and after them. If you swipe left or right, you can more directly between detail views in the order you set by tapping on a heading:

Navigation can become complicated, however, if one needs to navigate to a related view at some point. Currently, if we want to maintain our ability to move through the detail views in the order we determined by tapping a table header, I think we need to do something like the following:

In order words, if we want to go from B to the related view B1, we’ll need to navigate back to B again if we want to find C.

If, however, AppSheet would give us access to the native navigational information (that is, an expression that gave us the current “Next” and “Previous” keys for the record B, we could navigate as follows:

I’m pretty sure that @praveen has written about his long-term goal of giving creators more access to native capabilities. Access to native navigational capabilities is something I’ve been hoping for for a long time. Hope it comes someday.

[Kirk_Masden]

Another way to think about this is giving the developers the option of creating navigational actions that take the user to view that would result if the user tapped the back arrow and then swiped forward.

[Kirk_Masden]

So far, I’m the only one who seems to be interested in this (I voted for my own post ). Still, I really do believe that access to native functions like “next” and “back” can be useful.

Today I built an app with a table view that the user can sort in a number of ways with headings and then go through the items to chose records to copy via LINKTOFORM() to another table. The problem is how to get back to the same place in the table, with the same sorting arrangement. The only way I know how to do this is to hit “back” twice. If I have the form send me back to the table, I’m starting over – the sorting is lost and I am returned to the top of the table. If, however, I could build a navigation action with “two backs” the user could be transported back to the appropriate place in the table.