I’ve noticed that entries into apps via predictive text are read differently by Glide to words typed in letter by letter - when the actual word is exactly the same.
Also happens with numbers.
This means that answers that are actually correct are considered incorrect by Glide if the user types in the first couple of letters of a word and allows the device to auto-complete the rest. Also, in-app filters are setting up separate categories for the same word depending to how the user entered it (whether it was predictive or not).
It’s not a whitespace issue is it?
When you accept a predictive text entry, it will often tag a space on the end of the word.
Check your source data - do any of your “Spelling” entries have an extra space on the end?
Still, not sure why it happens. Easy for me to work around now that I know what’s going on but difficult for users who don’t know. Do I need to add a whitespace to the Action so that the app accounts for it?
The white space is added by default for any use of predictive
Is it absolutely necessary that this be a free text entry?
The best way to avoid this is to present a fixed list of values in a choice component, if that’s practical.
I considered a drop down choice list but there are too many possibilities. Also, the other app with the issue is a quiz type game where the possible entries are limitless. Surely Glide can account for the whitespace and treat it as nothing?
Not easily. The challenge is that Glide doesn’t provide any text manipulation functions (split/trim/substr/etc). It might be possible by doing something funky with a template substitution. @Jeff_Hager is good at coming up with creative solutions to these sorts of challenges.
Since it looks like some of the categories can have legitimate white spaces within themselves, (multiple words), we can’t do a template with a blanket replacement of space to blank.
Instead, what I would do is first create a template that takes the category and appends @, or some other unique character that a user would never type themselves, to the end of the category. Then create another template that sources from the first template and has two replacements.
First replacement would be space and @ ( @) and replace with blank.
Second replacement would be just @ (@) and replace with blank.
This will remove any whitespace trailing a category name by replacing it with nothing. This accounts for whether or not they included and extra whitespace or not. If you wanted, you could add a few extra replacements with 2, 3, 4 spaces just to account for any of those situations it a user types in extra spaces. Just make sure your replacements are in order from most spaces to least spaces.
Not by a computer to make screenshots, so I hope this makes sense.
