Show/hide toggle

[Kirk_Masden]

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:

Is there no show and hide toggle that doesn't require writing data? Questions

In this forum we can toggle between show and hide as shown below. Is it possible to do this in AppSheet without creating an action that writes data to the web each time the user wants to show or hide something? [tab] If, as I suspect, this is not possible, I’d like to put it on my wish list. Personally, I’d like to use it inside a detail view.

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.

[Marc_Dillon]

I think a showing/hiding toggle for columns would be more helpful in a table view.

[Kirk_Masden]

That would be nice too! I have at least one situation where I would like to have it in the detail view.

[Kirk_Masden]

Here’s a situation in which I thought it would be nice to have a hide / show toggle:

I would like for the explanation to be available when the user is wondering what the numbers mean, but such explanations don’t need to be shown by default. I could use a link to direct the user to an explanation on another page, but I’d like the user to be able to stay on this page, particularly if he or she wants to alternate between reading the explanation and then looking at the numbers.

It’s not a huge issue to have the explanation be visible all the time but, as this is already a long page with several sections, the lack of a high/show toggle means that much more scrolling.

[Marc_Dillon]

Good example. Perhaps just some small up/down arrows to collapse/expand LongText columns, like the red that I added to your screenshot:

[Kirk_Masden]

Thanks @Marc_Dillon! That’s exactly what I had in mind.

[Marc_Dillon]

When you go to vote on a feature request that you don’t remember hearing about before, but find that you’ve already voted for it, does it count as 2 votes?

Workaround BELOW!

This is a messy example, but I don’t feel like spending anymore time on it just now, you’ll get the idea

Basically, have 2 columns. one is your section header, and has an action attached to it. The other one holds a value switching between 0 and 1, or “hide” and “show”. The columns to hide or show have a show_if depending on that 2nd column. Apply fancy formatting rules on top of this.

[Kirk_Masden]

Very good! I either hadn’t thought of this or ruled it out too early and then forgot about it. It’s a good solution. The only thing that’s problematic about it is the need to write data to the sheet in order to toggle. That’s not a huge problem but it would be even better if the platform allowed us to do this with without cueing up more data to be written to the sheet.

Even so, I may wind up incorporating your solution into a future version of my app. Thanks!!

[elan_Bailey]

I’d love to be able to use this in detail view to clean up the design and collapse sections of related items.

I have some detail screens with 3-7 related sections - this would make such a difference to the user.

[pravse]

Adding to the set of thing we should consider for the details view. Thanks for the suggestion.

[Kirk_Masden]

Thanks so much, @praveen ! This is great news. I’m really looking forward to this and other improvements in the platform that I know are coming – even if I can’t always predict what they will be.

[Austin]

Kirk_Masden:

without writing to a table in order to do so

When you say without writing to a table do you mean in any shape or form? If you have a last modified timestamp you can have this feature by only updating that field on the same row. Or if you store the hidden text in a real column you could append a flag and remove that flag with an action.

[Kirk_Masden]

Yes, my hope would be not to have anything written at all to the spreadsheet. No addition to the numbers in the orange sync circle would be nice, if possible. We’ll see what the AppSheet team comes up with, though.

[cr130]

Any update if this will be done soon? Would make detail view so much cleaner and easier to look at.