Why AppSheet, WHY???

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Imagine you had heavily customized the system-generated views for a table (xxx_Detail, xxx_Form) and you created a bunch of actions which depends, among other things, on which view is the current view (some actions appears only for the Detail view, others only for the Form view).

Then you change your main view (Table view) to use a slice instead of the original table, and out of the blue your perfectly working app doesnt work anymore… why??? because AppSheet decided to create a NEW SET of system-generated views (_Detail, _Form) that lacks your customizations and, because of the name change, all your custom actions doent appear anymore.

Who tought that was an acceptable idea ???

And to make everything even worst, there is no way (appearently) to force AppSheet to call the older Form view when adding a record.

Not cool… not cool AT ALL (feeling angry)

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Sorry for your frustration… but this is actually intended behavior.

  • What happens… if you need special behavior for your “Active_Orders” vs. your “Pending_Orders” vs. your “Abandoned_Orders”?
  • If the root system view is used for all, this becomes a problem. And there wouldn’t be a way to override this - the root table views are used. (There is no way to say, this table… at this point… use this specific view (not in an inline view at least.))
    • Of course they’re ways around all of this (gotta love appsheet: 4 ways to do any 1 thing) - but it’s a matter of “how much dev work is needed”

So the decision was made, many years ago after lots of back and forth in the community (this was when AS was still a startup and not a Google product, the team was very involved back then), to default slices to their own system views.

  • The general consensus was: you’ll typically need more customized stuff for slices, so it makes sense to default them to their own things.

You can use event actions to take over the inline actions, taking you to root table view (removing the need to maintain special detail views for the slice - unless that’s what you want).

Sorry for your frustration.

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I understand.. what I don’t understand is why I am not able to decide which views to use in each case. These problems would be easily solved if I were able to select which view to use as Form view and Detail view. For the time being, I discovered that the problem with LINKTOVIEW was actually my mistake and not a shortcoming, so the app is back to normal again using my old views.

Thanks for your answer.

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