Filter Tabs/Menu by signed-in user

#1

It would be very helpful to have a “Tab/Menu Visibility” privacy feature, in addition to the global privacy settings.

Example:

I have an app that I want to be seen by about 100 users, using the Email Whitelist privacy, but only want about 10 of them to be able to see and edit certain data. So I currently have two separate apps (“User” and “Admin”) for the same Google Sheet, which is based on using two separate White lists (one for All Users, and one for Admin Users).

If I could select a whitelist for each individual tab/menu, I wouldn’t have to have separate apps, and could show each user only what I want them to see. This would also allow me to fine-tune editing permissions among my Admin users so that, for example, one user may be allowed to edit a schedule, while another is allowed to edit contact info, instead of both users having access to everything.

I hope to see this added to Glide’s many awesome features soon!

3 Likes
#2

Y have the same use with one of my apps.

#3

So i have an app for the elementary school I work at. Each teacher sees the kids in their class when they log in. I’ve created a “tab” called admin that I intended for the principal, vice principal, etc.(the staff that does not have 1 group of kids designated as “their” class) and the way its configured it is just a blank tab with seperators to those not designated as admin. It would be 1 less piece of stress to be able to use the filter option for the tabs to control which tabs are visible to each users and not just the data in them.

#4

Check out the Admin section of my demo app. I cleaned it up and modified it a bit from my previous version. Hopefully it’s self explanatory, but it allows individual users to have items, then an Admin section via the menu that lets them see everything. Not sure if it would give you the fine granular control that you want and it doesn’t show or hide tabs based on the user, but maybe it will help you out. Feel free to copy the app and take a look at the sheet.

https://concepts.glideapp.io/

#5

Hey Jeff, thanks for the suggestion, and sharing your concepts. I tried that early on, but for my purposes it doesn’t really work (or if it did, it’s not very intuitive feeling)

On my Admin app, I have 3 tabs:
“Settings”, which has a Privacy & Security message, a Text Edit component for a single text string that is used in many other parts of the app, 2 Relations and 2 other list-relations.

“Database”, with Add/Edit/Delete rights and a search/sort function.

“Attendance”, which allows a certain admin user to add attendance numbers and dates.

“Export/Backup”, which has multiple buttons for exporting schedules as PDF or CSV.

Each of those tabs is almost an app unto itself, with multiple levels of data.
So for me to create email lists and list relations for each of those sheets, with multiple admin users with different permission levels, seems to be a really long way around a short problem that could be solved with a single whitelist to hide/show each tab in the Menu.

Not to mention it would have a cleaner UI by eliminating these tabs or menu items that are of no use to 90% of the users.

Plus, as Marty mentioned above, this tab whitelisting would be helpful in other ways where it makes more sense to hide a whole tab rather than just lists within a tab. This opens up a lot of potential for design customization by the Developer. For example, beyond just Admins, we could put the customization in the User’s hands by creating a “Show/Hide” menu item to let ALL users decide which tabs they want to see using Switch components for each optional tab. (Use example: A Sports complex has Baseball, Football, Basketball, Volleyball and Soccer, and has schedules, team lists, etc. for each sport. Every sport could have its own tab, and the user could hide the sports he’s not interested in, simplifying the UX. This would be a nice feature to include with the Onboarding concept you’re working on.

This will also solve another niche issue for those who have a separate Admin (or other) app, wherein if you have multiple apps for the same sheet, there is no way to copy more than one app to another account. (IE if I wanted to share my Admin and User apps that link to a single sheet, you could only copy one of them…if you copy them both it would create separate copies of the Google Sheet, and the data would not be linked).

Long story short, I think adding a per-tab privacy feature will be an elegant and intuitive way to solve a lot of issues and open up design options, and hopefully we can get enough Likes on this thread to gain some traction with the Development team!

1 Like
#6

Solved on another post.
you can check it out here.

#7

Would you be willing to elaborate a little bit on this? No rush. I have invoicing in my app and I would love a way to build a PDF on the fly. I know of a way to build a link that creates a PDF from a range of cells in a sheet, but every time I use the link on my phone, it still opens the spreadsheet instead of opening the PDF. I’ve considered looking at third party add-ons it Zapier, but haven’t done a lot of research yet. Just curious how you are doing your export to PDF.

#8

Thanks for your suggestion. I’m already using a solution similar to yours that technically works, So I don’t really need help getting it working… this is just a feature request to simplify the process with per-tab privacy settings.

#9

Hey Jeff, I’m probably using the same method you are (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{SPREADSHEET ID}/export?gid={SHEET ID}&exportFormat=pdf&format=pdf&portrait=true&single=true&size=0&fitw=false, or some variation of that), which works beautifully on the computer and iOS. But for some quirky reason it doesn’t work on Android, unless the user has a PDF app installed.

If you don’t need it formatted in portrait mode, you can try adding "https://docs.google.com/viewer?url="before the PDF export url. It looks redundant as a link, but this forces it to be opened in the Viewer mode (both on Android and iPhone), which appears in a format similar to PDF. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to add the formatting variables to the Viewer mode…only PDF mode (which again, works on iOS and Computer, but not on Android unless the user had a PDF app installed).
But if you find a way to format it in Viewer mode, I’d love to hear it!

Hope that helps some!

1 Like
#10

Thanks for getting back to me. Yes I’m using the same export PDF link method, but for some reason it opens the sheet instead of creating the PDF. Works fine on my desktop, so it’s definitely an Android quirk. Didn’t know about the viewer method, so I’ll have to check that out. Otherwise I’ll have to explore third party options.

#11

Can you guys share an app with this functionality so I can see what you are speaking of?

1 Like
#12

I don’t currently have a public app with this functionality, but essentially it’s just a URL that you place in a column and view as a link in the app. So essentially you can create a dynamic PDF view of one of your sheets without opening up google sheets. For example, I’ve included two links that point to the NotesDetails sheet in my Concepts app. The first link creates a PDF, but the second link opens a Google Docs viewer to view the spreadsheet. The PDF and Viewer both show data that’s currently on the sheet as of the time you open the link. If you look closely at both links you can see the SpreadsheetID and the SheetID (gid) are part of the URL.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/191-c-NXW38hq9h7i7Fe5FlB8pP3e_mfeQHLUGsgwMYU/export?gid=1839695007&exportFormat=pdf&format=pdf&portrait=true&single=true&size=0&fitw=false

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/191-c-NXW38hq9h7i7Fe5FlB8pP3e_mfeQHLUGsgwMYU/export?gid=1839695007&exportFormat=pdf&format=pdf&portrait=true&single=true&size=0&fitw=false