Hey everyone! I’ve been going in circles trying to solve this and could really use a fresh perspective cause I’m not sure if this is something incredibly obvious that I am missing, or out of the scope of what glide offers. This is all completely new to me so I’m in a whole different world right now and tbh surprised I’ve made it this far😅
I’m building a digital wardrobe and have most of the core features working already:
A master wardrobe table holding all of my items
Filters for categories like Tops, Bottoms, etc. using a multi-select chip setup tied to a user-specific working table (so it works even when logged out)
A card collection to display the items visually
Details page on each item with additional information, photos, and the ability to edit the data
Now I’m working on a way to create and manage additional custom wardrobe collections – such as “Goth Wardrobe” – where I can view filtered subsets of the main wardrobe without duplicating items, so that everything remains in sync, but I am having trouble doing this and I am going around in a loop.
A page that displays these collections in a grid (collection cards)
A button to create new collections via a form
Clicking a collection opens its detail screen
Inside that screen, I show a filtered wardrobe collection (using a boolean is selected toggle)
There’s an “Add Items” button that opens a screen with all wardrobe items as cards
Card click triggers a workflow that toggles a boolean (Add-Item Selected) and visually marks the card with a emoji
This setup works perfectly for one collection… but here’s where I’m stuck:
Right now the boolean isn’t collection-specific, so I can’t reuse it across multiple collections without either:
Duplicating the logic and adding a separate boolean column per collection (which obviously doesn’t scale, especially if I were to add user support in the future)
Or switching to something more relational (which I’m not sure how to build cleanly here)
What I want to achieve:
Click to “select” items (using that boolean)
When ready, hit a “Confirm Add” button that adds the current collection’s name into a text column called Collections on each selected wardrobe item
This should allow items to exist in multiple collections, separated by commas (e.g. Goth, Vintage)
Bonus: I do plan to add a dropdown field on the item edit screen so users can manually assign an item to collections — just like how item types are set. That part’s easy and works great for one-off changes.
But what I really need is a proper bulk add system: a dedicated “Add to Collection” page where users can select multiple items at once and assign them to a specific collection without editing them one by one. That’s the core of what I’m trying to build here.
Any suggestions on the cleanest way to achieve this without rebuilding the whole flow for every collection? I feel like I’m missing something incredibly obvious here
I think I’d suggest a slightly different approach. Instead of adding a list of Collections to the Items row, I’d add a list of Items to each Collection row.
The Multiple Texts column would work well for this. It would allow you to store an array of ItemIDs in each collection row. You could then use it as a filter on a Collections details screen (or use it to build a relation to Items, which in turn could be used as a source of a Collection component).
To add items, use a combination of Make Array plus Set Column Values.
To remove items, use a combination of Remove Element plus Set Column values.
To add multiple (selected) items at once, create a query column that matches all selected items, then do a lookup through the query to get an array of ItemID’s, then use that in the Make Array column.
You’re obviously a quick learner, so hopefully I’ve given you enough to get to a solution. Let me know if anything doesn’t make sense, or needs elaboration.
AHHH thank you, this is the most progress I’ve made so far. I get stuck after making the array.
I made the query, lookup and array in a new blank working table, but i’ve run into the issue where I can’t select the array for my button because the source of the collection is the wardrobe collection table, not the “collection picker” working table
Either that, or you should be able to use a Single Value column to fetch the array.
That said, I think it’s better in the Collections table, because if you’re adding items to an existing collection you’ll need access to the saved array.
Hmm, even doing this from collections - it seems I cant select an array, lookup OR query for the “set column values” action. Am I meant to use a different action?
I changed the action to “array to set” which seems to write the selected ID’s into the “item ids” column - however I am now trying to make this final collection filter from those ID’s. The Item IDS column is in the wardrobe collection table whereas the component card collection is pulling data from the “wardrobe” table
OH! I had to enable it. Okay - I have the button working and the ItemID is now a multiple text column. I need to somehow get the data from ItemID to show up in the Wardrobe table so that i can filter the collection to show only items selected with rowid for that collection
Okay I FINALLY got it to work, however, because the “Wardrobe Collection” page includes cards that serve as each collection, the filters are shared across it so it just shows the same data.
Sorry, the gif is quite difficult to follow. I can’t pause it, and I can’t read the collection filters.
Any chance you can make a loom video - or at least show me a screen shot of your collection filters?
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