New Glide user - been checking it out before using in anger

Hello all

As per the subject, I have been evaluating Glide the last few days. I am really impressed (particularly by the quality of documentation and the videos which are brilliantly well presented)

But I have a few small quirks / questions I am wondering if anyone can help me with.

  • Pretty sure this is not possible - but would love to have a little more control over standard buttons (not choice buttons). Would like to change the colour / display style of some individual buttons.
  • Why are the “Items Data” fields so fixed on Card, Grid, List and Table components? For Card, Grid and List - they don’t seem to follow a logical order either. I often find myself using Meta for Title depending on what I want to achieve. Oh - and what is Meta anyway??!
  • The image field on those same components is usually a waste for me - as my data does not have images.
  • Shame I can’t add columns / change the widths of the table view - but I have since found Data Grid which helps there. Would love to see a group option in Data Grid mind.
  • Sorting - would like more options here. Ie sort by field 1, then by field 2 etc
  • Grouping - would like to be able to sort by groups too. Not sure how the sorting is decided when grouping at the moment.
  • Then if filtering a collection - I can’t work out a way of displaying a “No records found” message if a no data returned. That would confuse my users I am sure (they are not very bright)

Finally - I have a lot of data in Airtable at the moment. I think this is fine for some of my uses, which would be more about displaying data than editing it. But a couple of my use cases would need the data to be updated / added to a lot. With the lag in Airtable (which I fully understand) - it does make it difficult. For example - currently adding a record doesn’t show the new record for a few seconds (I have read it can take up to 3 mins, but I have not found that - 30 seconds tops so far). This would be quite a concern I think as again it would confuse users (for example when changing the status of an entry). Glide tables are so snappy - but I am keen to use Glide just as a front end and keep the database with Airtable.

Anyway - just thought I would share what I have come up against so far. I have been searching for a good front end for Airtable for months now but haven’t made the jump yet. It’s seems to me that Glide is well supported and very much in active development.

Keen to hear anyones thoughts.

Best wishes,
Andrew

This is kind of possible with a template column. So you could join multiple column values together and sort by that template. Obviously you can’t do something like sort ascending with one and descending with the other. Also, you have to be careful with spacing. ‘A100’ and ‘A2’ may not sort as expected, so you may need to do some special tricks to add leading spaces or leading zero. But overall, it’s possible if you formulate the sort value properly. Sometimes I’ll also add some sort of delimiter between joined values. Just depends on the specific values you want to sort by.

Groups appear in the order that the data is sorted. So, whichever group appears first in the sort will be the first group displayed. Second group that appears in the sort will be the second group, and so on. What I do is similar to my advice for sorting. Create a template column that joins the group and the sort value together, then sort by that template value, so the group will be considered first and the other sort value considered second.

I would need more information regarding your setup and and the particular filter, but if you instead use an IF column as your filter, and then use a rollup in maybe the user table, you can determine if the filter will return nothing. Based on that, you can conditionally show a text component that says there is not data. Again, possible, but depends on your specific situation.

This shouldn’t be the case. Data entered within glide should show up immediately. There may be some time before is shows up in airtable, but as long as you are not relying on additional logic to happen within airtable that needs to sync back, then there shouldn’t be a problem. If you have a video of this happening, it would be useful.

3 Likes

Re: Airtable, I had that discussion a few times before, it seems like Glide does indeed have that problem. What OP in the thread below described is the same as what Andrew said.

1 Like

Hello both

Thanks for your help and input here. I have actually solved the Airtable lag (and just posted about it here : https://community.glideapps.com/t/user-specific-columns-and-airtable-sync/56946/8

Great tips re sorting and grouping too. A little clunky but it works as you say - so thanks. Same goes for the filtering a collection option (showing a no records found message) - I have not implemented that yet, but what you say makes sense.

Thanks,
Andrew

1 Like