Dropdown List of Related Items in Form

[Matthew_Wolman]

Hey guys,

I’ve asked this as a question but I’m not getting any straight forward answers. My goal is this: I’m going to post this as a feature request and, either: 1) someone will respond and say “we already have this” and point me in the right direction or 2) we don’t actually have this and it does belong as a feature request. That being said…

Example App for example below: Login - AppSheet - I’m not sure how to make the app public though so if this link doesn’t work, let me know.

I want to be offered a list of Related items in the form for a certain record. For example, let’s say I have two tables: a Category table and a Food table. The Category table is going to classify foods as either a Fruit or some other category I choose (I’m sure you can imagine).

So, now, I want to create the Vegetable category. When I’m creating the vegetable category, I would like a dropdown of all the values from the Food table, so I can select which foods are vegetables as I’m creating the category. Under the hood, we would just be pre-setting the system to say “After you create this record, take the key of this record, and apply it to the Ref column of all the selected records.”

Is this already a feature and I just don’t know how to do it? Or is it something that I can request as a new feature?

[Matthew_Wolman]

I’m going to add to this request, because, when I click on the Fruit record in the Category table, it shows me a box for “Related Foods”. My expectation was that, when I click to add Related Foods, I would get a dropdown of all the foods I can select. I’m not offered a dropdown, rather, a form to create a new Food.

So, the request is, the ability to make a dynamic dropdown of Related items, and create the entire list of related items, when adding or editing a record.

[Hamlet]

Hello @Matthew_Wolman,

You do this with actions. I have done it this way: Enumlist field in the “Category” Table with an expression that brings me the relevant records from the “Food” table. Than when I save that form, an action is triggered that looks at the values in that Enumlist field (which should be row IDs of the “Food” table) and runs a “Set this field to this value” action on all the “Food” table rows that were selected on the “Category” table Enumlist field. That will set the value of the category field on each affected record of the “Food” table to the corresponding value.

Then, when you look at the “Category” record, it should have a list of the related records in the “Food” table.

[Matthew_Wolman]

I’m trying to follow your steps but I can’t reproduce it. I don’t understand your directions exactly. Would you mind providing me an example I can look at?

[Hamlet]

I can’t go into my app right now to take screenshots and it’s kind of hard to explain without them.

But look up more info on:
-Actions: “Set the value of some columns in this row”
-Actions: “Execute an action on a set of rows”
-INPUT()

That last one is more for the way I wanted to do things in my app. There are usually several ways around the same problem.

Watch this video: Looping with Actions (in Under 2 Minutes) - YouTube

He’s doing something more complicated, but it’s definitely in the scope of what you are looking for.

[Marc_Dillon]

You could have just tried being more patient on your original thread…

List of REF_ROWS dropdown not appearing Questions

In a one-to-many relationship set up, the key value of the “one” is stored in the records of the “many”. That means that the data change necessary to create the reference has to be in the “many” records, not the “one”. In this regards, you’re looking at it quite opposite from the beginning. Often, in Appsheet, a typical one-to-many, or “parent and children”, relationship is created by first creating the parent record, then from within the parent record, the children are created. This child crea…

[Steve]

Matthew_Wolman:

Is this already a feature and I just don’t know how to do it?

You just don’t know how to do it.