How to indent

[Kirk_Masden]

I’m sure that this little technique of mine is frowned upon by AppSheet. I don’t think it’s part of Google’s “material design” concept for apps. Still, I wanted to make a hierarchical outline like this:

In this case, I think the outline structure is easier to understand than a plain list.

So, how is it done? With spaces . . . I know, I know . . . not exactly rocket science. But, there is a trick to it just the same. Ordinarily, AppSheet would ignore spaces at the beginning of a line. So, I had to trick the platform into doing my bidding. Here’s how I did it:

1. In the Google spreadsheet
   =concatenate(CHAR(HEX2DEC(“200B”))," ",L7)
   You can’t see it but there are lots and lots of spaces between the quotation marks.
   I’ve explained what this HEX2DEC character does here:
   How to make a mirrored histogram in AppSheet
   The “L7” cell has text that I use in other contexts. It may not be necessary here. Then again, it might be necessary to have something after all of the spaces. I can’t recall right now. (It’s been a long time since I first did this.)
2. An “indent” virtual column
   The column in the step above this one is “Quotes” in my app. Here’s what I have in my “Indent” virtual column:
   left([Quotes],8)
   The number controls how many spaces will be used in the indent. Season to taste.
3. The target column
   I use something like “concatenate([indent],”• your archive")" to get what I want.

That’s it. By the way, with an outline like this, a show/hide toggle might come in handy:

Show/hide toggle Feature Requests

I posed a general question about whether or not we have the capability to toggle between show and hide in a detail view (or perhaps another sort of view) without writing to a table in order to do so: It seems that the answer is currently “no” but that several other people would like to have the capability. So, I thought I would repost this as feature request.

It would also be nice if we could control the spacing between lines.

[Fabian_Weller]

Thank you @Kirk_Masden for this tip. I like it.

Indent is possible also with “Dummy” Format Rules.
It does not matter what kind of icon you use, but the highlight color has to be transparent.

[Kirk_Masden]

Thanks! That’s interesting. Your method is easier than mine. But, perhaps it’s hard to control the size of the indent with your method. Is that right? Is there a way to control how far in you indent?

[Fabian_Weller]

You see that [Phone] is more indent, because both dummy format rules apply. For [Customer] only one format rule applies. So that’s the only way how to control it: The number of dummy format rules.