I would like to choose what views format rule...

I would like to choose what views format rules are applied to… (Applying the formatting globally is making life difficult… Example, in a map view I want to see a red lightning bolt as a pin marker, and that’s tired to the latlong column… But I don’t want to see all that when I’m looking at the detail view…)

Maybe at the view we can add the format rules that we want to apply? Similar to how you did at the slice level, what actions we want to apply.

0 5 385
  • UX
5 REPLIES 5

Completely agree.

Architecturally, every UX option (including format rules) could be defined at three levels:

a) globally

b) at the level of the data/table/column

c) at the level of the individual view that shows the data

We’ve made somewhat arbitrary choices of what do at each level. Ideally, every choice would be available at level © and override the options set at higher levels. This provides maximum flexibility and it is what a programmer wants. But it is also potentially overwhelming and starts to look a lot less like a “no-code” intuitive app platform.

One of our bets was that the same data should look the same in every view, because formatting was intrinsic to the data, not to the view.

The escape hatch will be via the Context() function. Once we expose the view name in it, an AppSheet expert will be able to restrict format rules to only apply to some views but not others.

I actually think that the format rules should be at the column definition, basically in there with show_if and valid_if for each column.

Then we should think of the column definition like a “global setting” So any show_if, and format rules just straight up apply everywhere else, unless overridden…

Then the column inclusion/ordering should be handled on every single form. And you could have a little edit button. Where you can edit the show_if and formatting conditions, that would override any of the global settings that were made…

@praveen BAHAHAHAA we were writing basically the same thing at the same time… except for the escape hatch business…

Which actually, i’m pretty excited about and I haven’t quite thought through all of the places I could use it… (Formatting being one of them…)

Looking forward to it!

@praveen One thought though is that if you need to use an expression to indicate where to apply formatting, that starts to be far from no code… now i’m having to code where/when to apply certain formatting… (A simple pencil icon that opens up a formatting pane seems way more no code to me…)

Top Labels in this Space