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Welcome everybody. Back to the built on air podcast. We are in season. 25 episode 2, good to be back with you in July myself, Dan Fellers Ellie Losa and Camille Parks back as always.
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And last week we got an update on all the latest,
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Updates and everything. So hopefully, if you miss that one, make sure you go and check it out, get all caught up and latest news and updates and everything.
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So and they didn’t release anything new that I saw. So we’re gonna jump right into today’s segment. We’re gonna learn about bulk.
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Bulk update bulk uploads.
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Yeah, this came from a use case that I’m supposed to build about a week and a half from now. And before I did that, I was like, yeah. How do I actually want to lay that out in airtable and the general idea is, what I’m going to go over with a different kind of setup. Then the real use case I had in mind, but hopefully, the general idea is
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Somewhat useful for other people. I set up three different automations to do the same thing. One is an all-in-one automation, that does everything using some scripts and then two are. If you don’t have the option of using scripts, this is how you would do it with just native airtable. Same result, it’s just a little slower.
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For you, jump in. I’ll say
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Only Camille would plan a week and a half. You have to build it in a week and a half and you’re already prepping for it. This is a project being very careful to be vague that
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we build in airtable, and when I describe it to other air table, folks, they’re like,
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Should that be in air table? And I’m like, no God. No of course not.
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But this is the tool that we had. And so it worked and then because it’s already so big and complex and I was really trying to think of what is the simplest
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User experience that I could put in here that wouldn’t confuse people that just sort of would slide right in. And this is kind of what I came up with.
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As someone inspired by the person who originally asked for this set of features, but simplified a little bit so it’s not, you know, there’s a bit less clicking, I think.
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Yeah, cool. Let me get your screen up.
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There we are. All righty. So the use case I’m going with for this demo is imagine that you’re planning one or more parties and it for that party there could be multiple attendees and each attendee should be able to have their chosen meal. So someone might get a sandwich, someone might get a salad that kind of thing and if it’s a big event with a lot of people and suddenly, they don’t have sandwiches anymore and you need to bulk update all the people who are going to that party to chew some else for them. This is the general idea of when I’m going for, in terms of, I need to update several things that are linked to in this case launch party, or I need to create a bunch of attendees for launch party in one. Go and assign them what their lunch.
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Options are in one go.
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So with that, I’ll start with the simplest, it needs to be people who are going to the launch party. So
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Of the update type. And then this is sort of a preview of what we’re going to do later, new revised and remove.
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And first things first, I want to add some people. These are all just random fake records. I had Omni generate for me a full disclosure Omni helps create the records. I did basically all of the schema. So I’m just gonna stop at five and then for items, you know, just pulling this up so you guys can see what our standard options are now.
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You’ll see this Emoji placed all over the place in this.
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Set of interfaces and behind the scenes.
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I used an hourglass to denote, these are temporary items. Whenever you’re done with this screen, everything that’s in. These temporary Fields is going to be cleared out and set back to blank.
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So, let’s say I want to give everybody the default meal.
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Now this button has now appeared pre-filled contacts. That’s going back to. I have two different sets of automations that basically do the same thing. This one does not have the script in it. This one does I’m going to do the one with the script in it because I modified it this morning and I want to test that. I didn’t break it. I didn’t great. So I just said the standard. The default is, everybody gets water and a Caesar salad, but if I want to go back and edit and say well Linda
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Wants a coke and Linda wants a turkey sandwich and maybe Fatima still once water. But you once ham sandwich or something like that that allows me to in this temporary field.
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Do that pick and choosing of items to add to these contacts. But the way that this base is set up, its not just parties and contacts it’s parties and contacts. And the table is called requests, but think of it like a 10 B’s. So I need to create new records that represent alyx going to launch party and receiving water and Caesar salad.
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so, if it’s a new
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New type request. That’s really simple. If I scroll down it gives me a little summary of, I’m not editing any existing records, I’m creating five. So I’m going to hit create.
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And hopefully this part of the script isn’t broken either, it’s not great.
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So that’s going to go in and clear out some things. And then the second update record automation should be clearing out some things too.
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I see your table is reconnecting for me actually, I think my wife I may be
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A little down.
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Yeah, Jesus. Yeah. In the time between our last episode and now that was a mild outed
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it says reconnected, I am expecting these to be this to go back to
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empty. So it’s possible that something broke behind the scenes, but let me just
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In a new tab show, you what just happened?
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So, here’s even more of those temporary fields that you saw before and if I go to request, I now have five records all for launch party. With those five contacts. I clicked on their type is new and then here’s the actual items that they’re getting
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And then we haven’t made use of these two Fields yet, but I’ll go over that in a second. We go to contacts, they’re temporary items is now blank, so I can go back and reuse them if I so choose.
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so, with that,
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Let’s say I want to revise some requests or attendees that are already linked to this launch party. So this page has changed a little bit. This does make use of conditional visibility so if you’re on the Pro Plan you’re not going to have the benefit of having conditional visibility. You might need, either have multiple sections on this page or you might just have separate pages one for new and one for revised / delete.
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Yeah, that was
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yeah. Normally I try and do all of my demos from the perspective of a Pro Plan user. But that is the one kind of thing that I’m making use of here that Pro Plan use, yours can’t use basically. Every everything else is fair game.
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So the idea here is I could do the same sort of pre-fill options, I could have before but with a little bit extra as well. So let’s say I wanted to selectively update these two people and I wanted to set them back to the default. I could do that. So if I hit bulk,
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it’s now it’s not immediately overwriting their items but it is filling in the temporary filled with their new items will be
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So if that looks good to me, I can go back and and submit I’m actually not going to do that. And I’m instead going to show a
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Different option. I’m going to skip current and go for specific. I can say I want to give these people Sprite and pasta salad
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And if I hit bulk, it should fill that same field with what I just selected and then reset these back for me.
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Again, if I am done, I can hit update and it says, bees are the two that you’re about to update. But lastly I do want to go over the use of current. What current is going to do is copy and paste this field into this field. And the reason that’s here is because it allows me kind of really quickly to say they’re not going to match. I just know. I have to update both Alex and Fatima at the same time. So Alex is changing his meal, but Fatima is just changing her beverage, for example,
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And that’s each of these are basically. Just Time Savers. You don’t have to use the pre-filled options. You could just go in directly and make your selections. If you so chose in the real example that this was brought up for, it would be hundreds of possible requests for anyone like launch party and any given time, that’s why pre-fill is pretty useful. In this case, five, not that crazy, but if you have a couple hundred, yeah, you’re probably going to want to pre-fill some of these and this select fields that have the temporary. Our class symbol is what controls which one to prefill, because I don’t necessarily need to update every single request. That’s gone forward for launch party. I might just need to update some of them and I chose the grid view option because it allows people to quickly select all if they need to or they
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could copy and paste. If they need to same thing with these, you don’t need to use the pre-filled current because you can just copy and paste in that regard.
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so that’s that’s frustrating where it’s like there’s some things I like the list for but like you were saying grid, does certain things that list you can’t I wish that list you could support the grid like
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I I would agree, I think list is list has some advantages because list will or can I should say be the full height of every single record but great can’t you have to pick small medium large basically but list can’t you can’t do this copy and paste stuff. Yeah,
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That and the summary bars. I also
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Really miss when it comes to a list View.
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Yeah, I don’t really make too much use of this because it’s not really numeric and because this is so narrow.
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It doesn’t look great. But the idea of how many are you about to select that? You can get with the grid versus with the list View? And while I’m at it, I also made this a tabbed view so you could quickly go to. Well, here’s the only things they’re going to be affected these other three requests shouldn’t change once I hit the
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Um, update button here at the bottom.
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So now a couple things have happened.
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The.
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Items have changed. But you’ll notice this went from new to revise. So in the original use case, it was important to keep track of. Is this a brand new request that’s never, really been modified or is this or requests that might have already come through and some might have already approved and made the order
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But now it’s been revised. It was pretty important for that. Team to be able to know. Oh I might have to do something extra with this one because in order might have already gone out.
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So the automation knows to kind of flip that field from new to revise and it matches whatever you’ve selected.
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And the last use case here.
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Is removing people from the launch party. So I might say for two of the ones that I didn’t modify, I might take their request and just remove them. The pre-filled option went away because if you were moving somebody, you don’t need to change with their getting. You’re just saying they’re not getting anything, they’re not going to the party.
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Um, so same thing, it tells me what my options are it leaves the items where they are? Because you just sort of helps to identify requests of like, oh yeah, they’re getting the turkey sandwich. We’ll have one more turkey sandwich than we thought. We would because Linda is no longer growing that kind of thing.
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And that’s the kind of high level overview of what this bulk updater tool does.
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And from there, I can go into behind the scenes of how the automation works and then the alternate automation, you could use if you didn’t have availability with Scripts.
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Yeah, overall this is very very useful use case.
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There’s a lot of stuff going on here. That’s pretty cool. I’m excited to see under the hood. It’s pretty simple mostly because I’m really updating one field but you could extend this to be
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If there’s five different things that you need a book updated. Once you just scroll a little bit more to the right but the the plumbing is all the same basically.
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So, if I go into my automation, you’ll notice there’s only three and you might only need one. Like I said, if you have scripts, but if you don’t have scripts, you’ll need these top two. I’ll go with the script first because that’s the button, I was clicking during the demo. So trigger pretty simple because this is
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You know pretty workflow oriented when button is clicked is when I did this and again I can benefit from conditional visibility so I can say well don’t even try to run this until certain conditions are met and I want people to only do this from the interface so that’s why I picked that trigger.
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And then next thing, I’ll just go to the date of you really quickly under items. There’s just a simple, check box of these are the default options. And this fine record step finds what those default options are so I can paste them in using the script.
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Now, this automation is broken up into two conditions either. It’s a bulk update type of new, or it’s either revised or remove. These two can share the same script because they’re targeting the same table to update.
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For new. What it’s doing is, it’s finding all of the contacts that have their temporary project linked to whatever thing you just clicked on. In my case, it was only working off of launch party and that tells me which records I need to use in order to create new
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requests. So the scripts, I tend to keep my
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Demonstration scripts, really simple. So one at a time I’m just going to
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explain what we’re doing. So first, I need to know which project again launch party. We are going to be using for the request table. IDs in this case is the list of contacts action tells me.
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I’m actually forgot what action means because I’ve changed terminology in the middle of writing this. So I’ll get back to action later.
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First things first, I need to know there are some records depending on what I’m trying to do that. I need to create and some records that I need to update. So if I chose the new option, I’m going to be creating new requests but I also have to reset the contacts. Back to not having a temporary project link to them, not having temporary items. So, I need two different calls against two, different tables, or one against two, different tables, I should say.
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Next.
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if I go back to the
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Interface just you can see the three options of. How do I want to prefill things? If that was not empty when you clicked the button, then I know I need to prefill each contact with stuff. So, default items is pretty simple. I’m getting the
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IDs from that fine record. Stuff of just default, equal true.
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And then I’m updating just that one filled with those items.
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if I chose specific, then I am getting
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A like do this while.
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I’m explaining this script. It would be pulling from this field, which is a field on the launch party record and it would be putting that value in. And again, that’s the only field that needs to update. But if pre-fill is empty,
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then I know that when
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if I look at like, behind the scenes of how this page is configured this button and
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I’m going to.
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Clear this out, actually this button and this button fire against the same Automation and using conditional visibility that allows me to say will pre-filled was not empty and you click that button, that means you’re ready to go, you’re ready to create the new requests and you’re ready to reset the context back to know. And the last bit is just
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Pushing those updates and dates to the table that needs to go.
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And then if I exit out of here, the next is a condition inside a condition which is a relatively new feature. Again, I was trying to keep this
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To like minimum infrastructure, if that makes sense. So again if pre-fill is empty, then I know we’re done, which means all of the temporary feels can go back to normal. If not, then only some of them need to go back to normal, just get rid of the pre-fill options up at the top. So I can go back and select a new option if I wanted.
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Revised and remove is very much the same. In fact, the script is pretty similar, except I don’t need to interact with the context table at all. So, from here about down, it’s basically the same script. It’s just only targeting the request table,
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So I don’t need to create anything new. I’m just updating existing requests.
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And with that, these are the same as well. Exactly. The same as the conditions of
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So that’s how I was able to do it all within one Automation and one of two scripts depending on what you’re trying to do. But if you don’t have options with scripts, I was able to do it in two, automation’s one for contacts and one for requests.
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So in this case, when button is clicked is referring to this button here.
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Which will conditionally appear, depending on what you’re doing. It is
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Going to do the clear out, the temporary items option first. That’s because ideally, I would have it after this Loop, but you can’t do that in airtable automation. So it happens first and then same thing as before. I’m getting all of the contacts that I need to update. I’m getting all of the items that are the default that parse the same. But now, instead of a conditional group, now, I have a repeating Loop
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And inside of that repeating Loop and I’m repeating for each contact, that’s associated temporarily with this project inside. That are the conditions and the conditions are
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if what type of pre-fill is happening, if I’m prefilling with the default,
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Then fill in that fine record step. If I’m feeling in with specific,
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Which again.
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Response to this. It would be pulling from this item here.
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And then same thing, same concept as the script before, if pre-fill is empty, and you click to the button. Well, that means you’re ready to go. So, in this case, create a new request for each contact, linked to whatever project you’re on, links to that current contact in the loop, link to the temporary items that are associated with this contact. And it would always be of type new
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And then go back and clear out the contacts temporary fields.
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Request.
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Very similar except that has the addition of pre-fill this request. What it’s currently, requested items are current is not relevant if you’re creating a new request because there is no current, it doesn’t exist yet. So that’s the only difference between these two automations other than the table. It’s updating.
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So,
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Okay, did I understand correctly? So, the script is, if you have scripting, you can do it that way. Otherwise you use the other two. Yes. So you don’t need three automations. You either need one automation or two automations and did you always have all three turned on so you have both approaches running? Yeah, they’re they don’t conflict so I can do.
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This and give everybody pasta salad and Coke. And if I do this,
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I’m hoping. Yeah, so it’s doing the same thing that the script which again is the bulk button. It has the same end result.
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I might have gotten rid of the update button at the bottom. That’s connected to the non script automation, but that was okay. So they’re connected to different buttons. Yes. So let me edit this page and then show there’s three buttons here pre-filled contact or pre-filled requests and it knows which of these two buttons to show based on whether it’s new or revised. If it was new, it would say, pre-filled contacts, if it were revised, it would say pre-filled request this one. And if it was maybe show where you set up that visibility. Yeah, sure. So, on any one of these buttons, bulk doesn’t have any visibility,
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The update type for pre-filled context has to be new. And I only want it to show if
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We aren’t prefilling anything, or we’re prefilling with default and then contacts, temporary contacts is not empty. Because
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if I try to run this and I haven’t selected anybody to add yet, then what’s the point of the animation? It’s not going to the loop is going to be empty. So don’t show the button until there’s at least one contact to Loop through in the first place.
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And then for pre-filled requests that visibility is a little bit simpler. It’s just is the book type either revise or remove. And if pre-filled items is not empty and again, pre-filled items is this field here where it’s what type of thing are you trying to pre-fill?
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And this itself has its own visibility because it shouldn’t be visible. If you were moving again you’re not pre-filing. If you’re removing people, you’re just removing them.
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And then items has visibility where if you’re prefilling with something specific. Well then you need to know which items are the specific ones. You want to pre-fill otherwise you don’t need this field at all.
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Love it. I find myself really missing the conditional visibility when I’m working on an account that doesn’t have it. Oh, like
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It’s so used for it unlocks so many things. You don’t have to look at a bunch of things at the same time, like I zoom out a little bit. If I didn’t have conditional visibility right, I’d have the contact Section and the existing requests section on top of each other and I guess you might be able to use that to your advantage. If you wanted to add new people and revise existing people in one go. I suppose that could be useful but I would find that a little bit confusing because what am I doing?
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Exactly. And then you probably have to have two different pre-filled fields because
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Are you prefilling? The contacts. Are you prefilling? Your existing requests, so conditional, visibility really helps and that you only have to give one link to people to say, oh, you need a book update. Go to this page and not well either. Go to this page or that page, you can give people one place to go, and they only have to look up what’s relevant at the time.
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Yeah, the one, the one drawback it’s not really drawback, it’s kind of the way it’s designed but I’m sure a lot of times you have the same like data set that you want to show but maybe like filter differently depending on visibility. So you might have one block that’s visible. If the status is X and then and then a different version of that data, if it’s why. And so,
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when you want to change like the fields to show up in both, you now have to update two different things. So, I’ve had cases, where I’ve got, like, multiple blocks depending on visibility. Only one is going to show at any time in your constantly, having update all three blocks.
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Yeah, it’s it only goes so far. Yeah.
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But still very powerful that you could have conditional data showing.
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Seriously.
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But sometimes, the the maintenance becomes.
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Much.
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always easy to remember like especially like, Dan is you’re saying, we have a couple of use cases where there’s a bunch on the page if you were to go to edit, but if you’re trying to find the exact grid that’s currently visible, when you’re not an edit mode, it’s like well, now you’ve got a signal to yourself when you are in edit mode, which of the
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Like visibly similar grid. This is the grid, you’re trying to edit and you can do that with either the name or the description sometimes but sometimes you don’t want to confuse your end users about. I don’t understand what this description means. You know, that kind of thing. So
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yeah, there’s a couple of things that
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make it a little bit hard to maintain over time if you have a bunch of stuff hidden,
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Yeah.
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100%.
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I love this approach though, it.
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makes me think of like the early days of interfaces when you couldn’t add records at all, and you had to like make up automation’s like this, to even add one record like you’d have the button, click add the record to that table and
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But like this is super useful. When it comes to adding many things at the same time, which is awesome.
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yeah, over time, I interfaces
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Have gotten pretty far. And this is another time where like, well maybe you should make a custom interface for yourself of this is like a key workflow and conditional visibility is not cutting it and or anything like that.
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That might be useful to you but this layout the record review, I think it’s what it’s called is it’s good enough. I think for what I was trying to
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Like show as possible.
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You know it gives me just enough where I can have helpful things like this. Okay, you’re about to edit three things. Even though there’s five things in the table things like that. Yeah.
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Yeah, the one thing I struggle with the record review is reusability, right? So a lot of time like that’s one of the benefits of the record detail, sidebar. As you could reuse that in other pages and yeah.
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All the time. Very true. And I think I try to explain this verbally before. But like this page, right? Bulk update, or this page, actually has two parts to it. The whole page is called bulk updater. But this section here, which is basically a detail page. Has its own name that you can only find in a couple of ways, either.
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Like this. You have a when a button is clicked and it’ll tell you the name of the button that’s useful. But first of all interfaces on here twice and buttons on here twice that’s bizarre but like inbox record detail is what this is called.
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but like,
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Inbox is the old name for record review, I guess. But like, you can’t really control that.
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Depending on how you arrive at a page, though, you can. So Pro tip
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And again, I try to explain this verbally and it wasn’t helpful. I don’t think add a button that triggers an Automation and then go to that Automation, and then click this thing. And then you get the actual detail page for this thing and then you don’t think I’ve ever seen this. I, I found it not by doing this, but this is the easiest way to do it if you have sandbox on and you were to edit
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This page. It’ll say oh, you’ve updated inbox, record detail, and God help you. If you’ve duplicated this page because it’ll say, inbox record detail to every time you’ve duplicated it. So it’s not two, three, four, five, they’re all too even though they’re different pages. So, I went down the rabbit hole a little bit of being like, how could I possibly tell the difference between these very similar Pages? The real use case that this was inspired by, has I want to say, six to eight of these pages that are very similar, but they have cleared differences in terms of how they’re filtered and all of that. And you cannot tell the difference between them behind the scene unless you jump through these series of Hoops to rename the page. So I’m going to say bulk edit detail or something like that.
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If I published this and then yeah, well now it’s more specific, you know. Now, you know which page it really is
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But boy.
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Okay there’s a lot going on here. Okay because the way where I normally see it is from the field dependency. Yeah it’ll say inbox inbox inbox and you’re like where is that?
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Yeah, don’t link. I wish I wish these would link directly to that page. I know. Oh my God, it’s updated here. But like it calls it a detail page because it is but it’s also like if you’re not as familiar with building an airtable you’re going to be like, but it’s not a detail page, it’s an it’s an inbox. It’s a record review so you’re going to be looking in the wrong place. Probably.
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But yeah. Okay. And then I’ll go back to the edit page that other table. This one, look at the URLs like could we recreate because
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That you could reuse this but not in the way that useful. Like if you you could I think hold on I think you could, you probably could I just feel like let me get a
[00:35:02]
hold on.
[00:35:03]
I just feel.
[00:35:07]
I don’t think it’ll like I’ve tried messing around with that for the big, for the side sheet detail Pages, how it like does Basics, 64 and coding. If you like
[00:35:21]
Anyway, I don’t understand. But how did you even get to this page again? Can you can you do that again? Yeah, I was from an automation. That is triggered by a button that is on the page.
[00:35:35]
It does give you this link, but not from the dependency checker for reasons unknown, but you can find it from there and that’s how you open up the detail page without the sidebar.
[00:35:49]
Attachment to it.
[00:35:52]
Helpful. And now is that, is that ID the the page ID is that the same one as the outer level. That’s unique to this record detail. Yeah, let me put these side-by-side so the page ID for the detail page and see mmm and the full page in coh. So they’re yeah. So they store them as a detail page. Why Can’t We reuse them?
[00:36:19]
I don’t know.
[00:36:22]
and I’d like I have so many times like I used to love record review and I set up all my initial interfaces as record, review pages, and then stop doing it because I could
[00:36:33]
I was doubling up on my work. Yeah.
[00:36:38]
Yeah, this is a now. I wonder so in the
[00:36:43]
In. We’ll have to test this in mCP. You can get a list of all the page IDs. Does that give you the record detail Pages or just the high level? Probably just the high level.
[00:36:55]
Actually the other day. I don’t know. And I don’t know if you can like cheat with the mCP, if you say.
[00:37:04]
This is you can’t do it with this type of page, I’ll be. But if you had a list View,
[00:37:10]
Of projects and from the mCP you said allow clicking to record but provided a different page ID. Then the thing that was just created like it’s not going to let me select.
[00:37:29]
Where did it go? It’s not going to let me select this thing, but if you have the ID and you say to the mCP,
[00:37:36]
You use that one? I wonder if you can fake it. I don’t know. I don’t think the mCP King create.
[00:37:43]
Pages. I think it’s just list them.
[00:37:46]
And maybe you’re wrong on that.
[00:37:49]
I know Omni can so it. Yeah, it might be a thing of maybe you can force Omni to maybe tell me like create, create this record page with this idea. I’ve got a, I’ve got Omni. All right, let’s
[00:38:06]
live test. All right, I’m gonna select this.
[00:38:10]
Update the list interface to open the detail page.
[00:38:21]
when a record is,
[00:38:25]
Clicked.
[00:38:27]
I spelled clicked wrong.
[00:38:31]
Adjust.
[00:38:36]
Wild.
[00:38:39]
that’s,
[00:38:40]
I’ve never seen that page before, but that’s really helpful to be able to rename that page now
[00:38:50]
Yeah. Now hold on. Omni why?
[00:38:54]
I suspect you didn’t do it. It didn’t. Why is that the interpretation?
[00:39:04]
Of what I asked for. This is why I say, I don’t like Omni, it’s not that it can’t do useful things. Is that sometimes instead of just saying, oh, that detail. Page isn’t compatible or whatever. It says, oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll read the description to be the prompt. Why? Why would that ever be what I wanted?
[00:39:28]
Hey it at least spelled click, right? Yes, thank you.
[00:39:34]
one thing I’ve noticed that like,
[00:39:38]
I am wondering and I don’t know if this is new or or not, but when you look at the dependency checker for a particular field and say that field is on a detail page,
[00:39:50]
Then that detail page is used across multiple interfaces.
[00:39:56]
Then you’ll see the detail page listed, and then you’ll see all the other interface Pages listed.
[00:40:04]
At the top.
[00:40:05]
So what we comes really confusing to me is I’ve often I started at the top of the list and I go down but those other pages are only there because they’re tied to the detail page.
[00:40:16]
Like the ah okay. I think I see what you’re saying.
[00:40:20]
yeah, so this is a
[00:40:23]
this is I think an example.
[00:40:25]
Yeah, it is a little confusing because bulk edit detail. Right? Is only possible to be on bulk updater.
[00:40:35]
so,
[00:40:36]
Again, because their table is treating the whole page and the detail page inside of it as separate dependencies.
[00:40:44]
there might be marriage to that perhaps but yeah, this is a
[00:40:49]
Little a little confusing. Yeah.
[00:40:52]
Yeah, so I think my word of advice is, if you’re trying to like remove dependencies from something, like I often do is start from the detail Pages first.
[00:41:03]
Because that will clear your actual top list of the interface list. That bulk update and projects at the top there. If you can find your record detail page okay. Yes.
[00:41:18]
From here. That would be so nice. Yeah, these are they only expand in collapse. They don’t go to the, the page like you can from automation.
[00:41:32]
Exactly.
[00:41:33]
Like, I love and create a brand new interface with a list. Like I’ll put a
[00:41:38]
Dashboard layout and just drag a bunch of different groups onto it so I can just go to that page to switch them to the different detail Pages for each table like without having to remember what page has it. I just created a brand new list and then
[00:41:52]
I added it that way.
[00:41:55]
but,
[00:41:57]
Yeah.
[00:42:00]
Okay, I’ve got one more. Go to your data layer for like requests. I think you had it on request.
[00:42:08]
Okay, so for your select field.
[00:42:11]
What are, what are your reasons to use circles or click on the edit field and show all the different icons you can use? What are your reasons for Jesus Christ? That recommended whatever. Yeah, here all my options.
[00:42:28]
Yeah.
[00:42:29]
so, I chose a
[00:42:32]
there were a couple of reasons, right? I’m gonna
[00:42:35]
go back here.
[00:42:39]
Go away.
[00:42:40]
a couple of things if you’re using the grid like I am, you have the native check boxes, they don’t do anything like I can’t
[00:42:50]
I can’t like bulk unlink or bulk, the leader or anything based on some settings that I’ve included, but I didn’t want to confuse people by having two blue checkboxes right next to each other.
[00:43:03]
So that’s why I didn’t choose the check which is the default and I chose blue as a post to Green because green
[00:43:16]
Well, actually, you know, in this particular use case and you can see remove his color coded. Red blue is color-coded, revised and green is color-coded as new
[00:43:27]
I probably should have used a color that wasn’t one of those three things to be. Like this is a different concept but at the time I was working on the revised functionality and blue is revised and that’s why the dot is blue and the other ones like I’m not
[00:43:44]
Necessarily deleting things and star with feels star and heart are like I’m favoriting kind of that’s what I associated with them so I didn’t use that the thumbs up I think could work in this use case in flag. Felt like you’re saying there’s something there’s something wrong with this record at least to me. So blue felt like the most not blue. The dot felt like the most neutral of these options in terms of selecting that wasn’t already being used by are tables own UI to communicate. Something is selected
[00:44:23]
I like that. I almost never use the dots and I’ve seen you use them several times, and every time I see you use it. I’m like, oh, like that looks awesome. And I forgot that existed. Yeah, this is one of those things I forget, which plan as a limitation as well, but some plants don’t have all of these options. So I think
[00:44:47]
I’m probably going to get it backwards. I think all plants have the availability of each icon but some plants only have green but I could be wrong. I could be backwards. Maybe they have all colors but only checkboxes, I don’t know.
[00:45:05]
He might just be check and x and on the free, the lowest plan could be in some way. This is also limited but this is this is purely visual representation and
[00:45:19]
on the interface, right? I could have included a description that said hey if you’re revising a removing, make sure to you know, use the checkboxes, you know what I mean? Like adding some text here so that people aren’t confused about what they do and that would
[00:45:34]
You know, clear up confusion right now. It’s like you go to this page and you just know what you’re doing is what I’m assuming. But in reality, you would be including some, you know, fuel descriptions and some descriptions up here. And then I would probably add when you click update, I would probably have it. Be require a confirmation and say, hey, are you sure you’re about to
[00:45:56]
update a bunch of Records just so that if someone Miss clicks, they don’t, you know, ruin their data and all that. So again, this is a very bare Bone’s way of getting the point across
[00:46:08]
yeah, but I like that differentiation between the, the default checkbox because
[00:46:14]
We can’t really interact with the default checkboxes. Like we can’t like trigger an automation or query which ones were checked in our automation so it kind of are. The only thing you can do is like right. Click and then delete those records, I think. Yeah, one of my biggest
[00:46:32]
like, wants from
[00:46:35]
An interface to automation Improvement. Like obviously these buttons can trigger an automation but they’re all pointing at launch party. What I would want is you can have buttons on a linked record visualization like this what I want is to say based on what is currently visible on my screen. So if I put in my old my own filter or if I moved to the selected table like I’ve done run an automation based on launch party but include the visible records as another parameter so that I don’t need this select field, you know?
[00:47:13]
Because this is data, right?
[00:47:15]
Go ahead, Ali know, I’m just saying that drives me crazy.
[00:47:19]
yeah, it’s it’s extra stuff that you kind of have to put in and you know, somebody actually have to consider
[00:47:26]
This is all in the revision history. So depending on what your workflow is this could be really annoying to parse through. It’s a bunch of, you know, I selected in my unselected, it, you know what I mean? It’s air table is keeping score and
[00:47:42]
you know, sometimes you don’t
[00:47:45]
You know, want to modify the data. And this kind of brings back to is this a good use case for not using inline editing. But using
[00:47:56]
The edit s form thing and the answer is no, I tried. I really wanted to be a good use case. It wasn’t.
[00:48:05]
You’ve got a couple more minutes, I suppose I can explain why I’m gonna go to a new one, right? If I
[00:48:11]
Change this page and instead of being in line editable switch this to form.
[00:48:18]
Edit is up here and I can’t control the placement. That’s sort of petty but that’s fine. I’m going to hit publish and just sort of explain. Why I find this to be not the best.
[00:48:32]
What I want to say is like
[00:48:36]
if I’m doing new right,
[00:48:39]
I then need to select which contacts to add, which I could do from this form, but if I choose revised, then I have to use that checkbox to indicate which records I want to revise, and I can’t do that from here, so I would have to do okay, save. And then now, all right, there are no existing requests for this one, but then I would do the the checkbox here and that go back to edit. And then I would say, okay well prefill with the default items, right? And then hit save and then I could switch the trigger of the automation to be whenever this is not empty or something. So I don’t have to do a second button click but it’s it breaks up the flow of I can’t just
[00:49:29]
Do you everything from the form? I have to finish the form, edit some stuff. Go back to the form and then submit. So it didn’t quite work. In this instance, the advantage of it. If it did work out for me is that there’d be a few less things in the revision. History log because both pre-filled items and items. For example, could be updated in one save operation, and I wouldn’t see like everything piecemeal, everything would just sort of be one action and it’s a little cleaner and that regard.
[00:50:09]
Yeah.
[00:50:10]
Agreed. I also wish you could have more than one edit button like like you edit this section, then edit this section. Like, yes, that’s what I would like.
[00:50:22]
I’m going to flip this to new really quickly just to sort of demonstrate, even though in line editing is off, right? That doesn’t have anything to do with the
[00:50:32]
the things down here. I can edit this just fine. So it’s like, conceptually I get it because I’m not editing after party. I’m editing context that happened to be linked to after party, but you know what I mean? Like, it’s not a
[00:50:49]
if you were trying to look for one easy, way to
[00:50:52]
Stop editing everything on this page. This isn’t going to help you. You have to go back to the grid and make internal off.
[00:50:59]
Editability for this grid which is separate from the editability of the whole page.
[00:51:09]
Yeah.
[00:51:12]
That’s crazy. We explored a lot of things. This is very useful and found a new Easter egg that I’ve never knew about. That’s awesome.
[00:51:22]
Yep. Thank you for sharing that Camille. Hopefully, that was useful. Hopefully you gained some insights into bulk.
[00:51:30]
Bulk updates and conditional visibility and accessing all the pages and everything. So, lots of useful tips in here. Thank you. And we will be back next week for another Deep dive into a fun, exciting use case. So have a great week and we’ll see you next time.