A tricky case of inline lists on my conference app 🙏

gangyao · December 4, 2019, 12:07pm

Never doubt that there are many smart folks in our Glide community! So I came here to ask for help!

(Long and confusing posting…)

Imagine two cases that usually you can see at a conference:

1. One presentation has two or more speakers

2. One speaker has two or more presentations

Let’s look at them one by one. For the case, I want to show the presentation info, as well as info of two or more speakers. My idea was to create an inline list to show the info of the speakers so each speaker is clickable. When you click on it, you will be directed to the profile tab of each speaker, as shown below:

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It is fairly easy to achieve this goal: simply split speakers (Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Rosana Dolón-Herrero) into two individuals and link these two individuals (1.Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas; 2. Rosana Dolón-Herrero) to one presentation. Here inline list comes in handy, as displayed below on my spreadsheet:

For the case, it’s trickier. How to display two or more presentations on the profile tab of single speaker? For example, our speaker Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas has two presentations at the conference: one with her co-author (see the case above); and another on her own (see below).

As we might guess, inline list will be of help since there is one-to-two relation. But the problem here is that the presentation by Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Rosana Dolón-Herrero is different from the one by Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas. Note that the first presentation has two speakers, so I split the speakers into two individuals and also linked the individual Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas to the presentation. Thus I can see two presentations on her profile tab when clicking on her name. But how to link her second presentation on her profile? Like this:

With this pic, you might wonder: if I already got what I wanted, why do I come over again to ask for help? Please hang on a minute. This result wasn’t easy for me. It took me days to figure it out! Here is what I did on the spreadsheet:

I added another inline list for the second presentation, so basically there are two inline lists with the header of second pre hided. As you can the highlighted box above, I used “Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas” (under the column “2nd presentation=Program:Speaker(s):Multiple”) to successfully link her single-authored presentation to her first co-authored presentation. At the same time, I used “Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas & Rosana Dolón-Herrero” to successfully link her co-authored pre to her single-authored pre.

FINALLY, I’m going to show my problem: there are two “Ana Belen Cabrejas-Peñuelas” (Jesus, I hate Ana!) in my speaker list:

But I can’t delete neither of them, because…

I hope some genius could come up with a great idea to solve my problem. Many thanks in advance!

It might be helpful to see the spreadsheet of this app:

shchc · December 4, 2019, 11:57am

I had a similar issue on a conference app. I created a 2nd field for “co-presenter” and had two lists that displayed under each other. To get the full list of presenters, I made another sheet that used the UNIQUE function to gather one value for each presenter (use an arrayformula to bring in all values to first two columns then have the Unique formula in the 3rd.

It’s all about how you display the data and which list you select for a particular view.

Jeff_Hager · December 4, 2019, 1:00pm

Would it help to use an array of columns? So like @shchc suggested, create a second column, but you would name the columns ‘Speaker 1’ and ‘Speaker 2’. This will automatically create a virtual ‘Speaker’ column that Glide will see. That virtual column can be used for relations. Just looking quickly, I think this would make sense to do on your Program sheet. This should allow you to create a relation from each individual speaker to each program that they are an individual or paired up speaker. This should also allow a relation from Program to all speakers for that program, whether there are 1 or 2 speakers.

Here another thread where this method was used:

gangyao · December 4, 2019, 7:35pm

Hi @shchc @Jeff_Hager,

Thanks for the help! Not sure if I fully understand your reply. I named columns ‘Speaker1’, ‘Speaker2’, and so on, but Glide seems not be able to generate the parent name ‘Speaker’. Don’t know what is going on here… But drawing on the inspiration from you, I think I solved the duplication problem. In the ‘Program’ sheet, I duplicated the ‘Speaker1’, ‘Speaker2’, ‘Speaker3’ columns: the first ‘Speaker1’, ‘Speaker2’, ‘Speaker3’ columns help the pre info of ‘Speaker’ sheet link back; while the second ‘Speaker1’, ‘Speaker2’, ‘Speaker3’ columns serve to link to the profile tab of each individual speaker. Please see my Google Sheet for my details: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C9i82sebUGrOGlu9dIpXj-yWsAiqAPN42PVoPey4dp0/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks again!

Jeff_Hager · December 4, 2019, 7:45pm

You should have a space between Speaker and the number. So ‘Speaker 1’ instead of ‘Speaker1’.

gangyao · December 4, 2019, 8:13pm

I left space for ‘Speaker’ and number, but it didn’t work for me, probably because I applied inline list function on them

Jeff_Hager · December 4, 2019, 9:29pm

You have duplicates of all the speaker columns, which is probably causing problems. I would get rid of the second set of relation columns and set up a new relation in Glide. Your should be able to set up the new relation using ‘Speaker’.

Or give one set of columns a different name.