Asking for feedback on method of Tab text in Table (video)

Hi there, I tried something nifty with the text in my app, adding it to the first row of each Table that correlates to a Tab. I’m wondering if you’ve tried this and/or what you think about it. Thanks

App demonstration

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Interesting idea, I think I like it.

Took me a minute or two to realise how you were using that… so each of those “Tab - xxx” tables are ONLY used to drive their corresponding screen/tab, and no further rows are added to those tables, right?

Have you thought about how you might support multiple languages using this approach? My immediate thought is that you could have additional rows for each supported language, with their respective translated strings, then use row filtering to display the appropriate language strings. But not sure how that might affect your component interactions (ie. with multiple rows).

Great, it was devised during a moment of frustration when I wanted to shove my pen into my eye socket.

Yes, that’s right. The navigation buttons are used to set columns in other tables and also act as counters so that I can see how people are navigating through the app.

I hadn’t yet, but obviously it’s an important consideration given the industry I’m in.

Let’s hope it’s that easy LOL. If so, then I unknowingly did myself a huge favour.

Yeah, I’m not sure… I wonder how the user specific columns will react to that. The nice things about having the text already there is that it creates the row, and the RowID, so that you can immediately interact with it.

I guess one downside with this approach is that you won’t be able to easily re-use strings in other parts of your app. So you may find yourself creating a bit of duplication. For example, let’s say you have the text “Continue” to use as a button label. You’ll need this same text string repeated in every table where you want to use it.

A way to avoid that would be to use a hybrid approach, where you store commonly used text elements in your User Profiles table. This would make them available to be used anywhere in the app.

I’ve built a handful of apps that support multiple languages, and this is essentially the approach that I take. I have a single table that contains all the the text strings that are used throughout my app - including the translated versions of each string - and then I make them available in my User Profiles table via a relation and a series of Single Value columns. So my User Profiles table ends up looking something like this:

It’s a nice approach, but you can wind up with quite a lot of bloat in your User Profiles table (I think @Mark_Turrell can vouch for this - I helped him implement this method in his Covid app, and I think he has several hundred columns - and counting - in his User Profiles table). It could be that some hybrid of your approach combined with what I do might be an ideal solution for multi-lingual apps. ie. store all the commonly used strings in the User Profiles table, and have screen-specific strings in their own tables. Definitely something worth exploring, I think.

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Yes, this is true. I didn’t figure a way around that yet. I am exploring the combination of relations and single value columns as well.

I’ll try this out on a “public with email” app. I didn’t have the option on this totally public app.

This is nice, I’ll try it out soon :slight_smile:

This is the situation I found myself in with the other app I’m working on, and how I arrived at the “table per tab” approach that I tried here.