Hey Glide team, I was wondering… do you plan to add character limit restriction for Text Entry components? If so, how far out, do you imagine? Alternately, have any of you community Glide wizards come up with a work around for preventing users from submitting a form if certain text fields exceed a character limit? Maybe using Math/If-Then-That and perhaps Visibility of a Required entry as the validator? Although, I’m assuming Math in Glide doesn’t yet include complex enough formulas to calculate string length. Would really love this feature.
I haven’t done what you are saying exactly. I have used some scripting code to check for duplicate entries. In my case it is for people who sign up twice using the same email that is already in the sheet. I send an email to new users with some instructions and a link to the content creators app. I send a different email to them if they had already signed up and delete the new row created by the Glide form submittal that has the duplicate email. Amongst other timed automated functions there is about 500 lines of code. But this particular feature maybe around 100 lines.
We haven’t planned to do this yet. Can you tell us more about your use case so we can understand why you want this?
@david Pretty straight-forward use case. I was hoping for something twitter-like where you could restrict the number of characters in a text content post. Even in your Finstagram app, it would prevent people from writing a novel of a caption that would look terrible with word wrap in Inline Lists. In my case, the product I’m building will have tight text length restrictions as a part of its functionality… like Twitter. Micro-blogging. In fact, if this feature was implemented and you also allowed Text Wrapping of captions inside tiles of the Inline List, people could create a bit of a Twitter-like clone out of your current Finstagram template—making the tile background a solid color rather than an image, they would look like word bubbles with a little bit of text in them.
Edit: This is also pretty standard in online forms. Every forms plug-in includes it. All blogging platforms have it baked into their forms. Even oldskool HTML has a maxlength attribute for input text elements.
My guess is it’s probably not on the docket, which keeps this particular app I’m building more of a short term MVP here at Glide
But thanks @George_B for the tip on deleting duplicate entries! I have that on my own personal scripting wish-list. I created a “Like this Post” and “Flag this Post” form, but currently, a user could submit it 100 times and it would look like the post was getting much more love than it actually is or is being flagged as inappropriate by many more people than it actually is. So I do need to script something quick and dirty, even with just a daily trigger that deletes all dups in that sheet.
Of course, once the data from the “Favorites” component gets its own sheet this will probably be moot. When that happens, it would be nice if the Glide team could consider making the Favorite button a bit more versatile in style as well. Right now, the heart reminds people of Instagram-style “Liking” a post, when in fact, the functionality currently is more like a “Bookmark” or the Twitter-like Favorite—which is a heart now in response to FB and Instagram but used to be a star. Might be nice if we could switch between different icons in that component: a heart if people want to use it to calculate number of likes, a bookmark or star if people want to use it to keep track of a users personal favorites, even a flag if a developer wants to use it to track content that people are marking as inappropriate. Once we have access to the data from that component, I think it will be a very powerful Glide component. But again, not sure when that’s coming, so in the interim, I’m using a form. A little clunky, but it works.
Thank you for explaining. We will definitely do this but I can’t tell you when. I’m familiar with the commonplace requirement for a maximum character limit for text input fields—I only asked you to describe how you will use it so I can understand your use case specifically, not because I doubt that it’s legitimate.
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Could a potential workaround for me be an image link to a hosted page somewhere that is styled exactly like the app but contains a submission form that inputs the data into sheets? What would be the main drawback of using a hosted submission form to populate the linked sheet? I’m guessing the content wouldn’t appear immediately in the app? How often does the Pro Version of Glide check for changes automatically?
If you used a Google Form you could like the replies directly to the spreadsheet that Glide is looking at. I’m pretty sure that Google Forms has some of those limits you are looking for but I’m not sure. I believe that Glide polls for change in a 3 min cycle. So it could be as much as that but most of the times less.
Hmm. Now that I think of it, this probably won’t work since I’d need to know the user signed into the app for the content to be linked to them. And once you leave Glide through an external link, you lose that info. Unless I sent it with the link. I suppose I could use the Rich Text component to create a link that sends Glide data through GET. But could I add the email of the signed in user to that link??
Hi All,
Did anybody come up with a solution/workaround for this? I am thinking of an about space for members to enrich their profiles for others to see. And like pointed out before, that definately needs a limit. I think a limited text field should be somewhat easy to implement as a feature?
Thanks so much for any feedback on this.
Regards and wishing you a great weekend!
Marco
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No progress yet but quite a few threads about this at various times. Hopefully it’s coming soon. Please find and vote for it in the Features app!
Link to the post! 
Deep linking is a thing now.
I thought it was still in staging?
The feature request app is a staging app…but I guess you can’t share the link from the installed mobile app yet…just the browser version.
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Yep - I looked but didn’t see a way to grab it in the app yet. 
Yeah, that was my feature request from the first week the feature request app went live. sigh. My gut tells me that despite so many exciting new features coming before the end of the year this isn’t one of them, because character limiting is something more common in larger social products. And from the recent messaging in the pricing threads, I realized there is heavy focus on private enterprise apps atm which don’t often need character limiting (it’s more common to limit strangers).
I’ve just gone ahead and started to script my own form hosted on my own site and presented through Webview (trying to match the Glide style). Just for a character limiter lol. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work, cause when users open a form my form will be in there in Webview with its own separate Submit button. I guess they’ll tap my Submit and then Glide’s cancel button… trying to figure out some solution.
But cool to see that my request has 12 votes and a comment! I haven’t been in that Feature request app in months.
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It applies to every app that isn’t being used by Androids! Humans need their character limit. 
My gut tells me it’s imminent @John_Cabrera! 
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Any news about this feature ?
Yes, we shipped it.
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