One home screen with different buttons navigating to different tabs

#1

I’m trying to build a home screen which will list out all the navigation options. Button 1 will go to Tab 1 with its corresponding layout and components, Button 2 to Tab 2 etc.

I read the documentation and got some bits and pieces from here and there, but am not able to get it to work.

The Glide Community app is the functionality I want, with the ability to keep adding navigation items to the home screen. I checked this documentation, but would like some more details.
https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/actions/link-to-screen

Is there a more descriptive version of this or could you suggest any specific approach that I should adopt?

#2

On the tabs menu, put the home tab under the Tabs category and turn off the option to show tab labels. Then put all other tabs under the Hidden Tabs, this will cause the user to only use the home tab to navigate. On the layout menu, choose the image component to create your button and then use the action link to screen. If you want a more generic button, you can choose the butto component and then use the action link to screen.

#3

I’m sorry, I’m not an advanced user so I may be missing certain things you are suggesting. In the “Home” tab, what exactly should I have in the spreadsheet that I can create the layout for?

#4

Yes in your spreadsheet there should be a tab called home. On that sheet in the first row would be your headers which will correspond to your navigation buttons. You will use an image as your buttons, you will upload the image into google drive, right click on the image and click on get a shareable link. You will then paste the shareable link into the column the that corresponds with the header. You’ll do that for each button.

#5

Thank you. I have kind of figured it out, but I couldn’t get the image uploaded to the Google Drive to work. I used some other random images on the web to test.

The layout style would necessarily have to be “Details” for this to work, is that correct? Else I was seeing just the last image URL itself on the main page.

#6

This is my crude test app.
https://lcb37.glideapp.io/

#7

Yes, the layout would have to be “Details”. Looks good. When you get a chance I can take a look at your spreadsheet to see what might have gone wrong with the Google Drive image.

#8

Thank you @mmgt2005. I read in some other thread that Google Drive links work only for large images. Mine were small images and that could have been the problem. I put the images on dropbox and it works fine.

#9

Is there a way to make these image buttons dynamic? What I mean to say is that I should be able to control which image-buttons are visible on the Home tab and toggle them on and off based on some setting.

#10

So this is how I’m making the image-buttons dynamic.

I retain all the headers in the “Home” tab, but I just leave the image URL blank for the one that I don’t want to show. To remove an image button, I simply have to delete the corresponding URL from under the header and it syncs to the live app quickly, but to add it back again, I have to put the URL back in and then manually do “Reload Sheet” in the build interface. This means that I will not be able to put an if-else on the sheet to show/remove the URL, I will have to manually reload the sheet again for it to take effect. Unless there is a better way to do this which I haven’t figured out.

I tried dynamically repopulating the header rows with a filter from another Settings tab, but that didn’t work. I think in Glide you need to retain the headers in the same columns, else the whole thing is rebuilt from scratch.

#11

Yes, changing headers requires a rebuild of the app in Glide (Reload Sheet).

You should not have to do the Reload Sheet if you are just adding or removing the URL in the rows below the header in the sheet. Sometimes it will sync quickly, which may have happened when you deleted the URL, but other times it may take up to a few minutes for Google to notify Glide of the sheet change. From the sound of it, what you are doing is just fine.

#12

I’ve tried this:
1 column with the URL , not displayed in the layout
2 column with true/false, not displayed in the layout
3 column with an if formula if(column true false, column URL source, “”). This is the column to show in the layout
Though images delay two or three seconds to be shown/unshown It works for me.

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#13

Using this now for the top level display of a specific tab, thank you. Since it is a top level list item even if the image disappears it still shows up on the screen, but it kind of works out for me in this specific scenario which I am using to indicate currently inactive users. So I am able to access their data, but the list item without image indicates that they are inactive.