I have a question about how form screens and detail / edit screens behave in Glide Apps, and I’d like to confirm if my understanding is correct.
When adding an action like “+ Add” to open a new form screen, it seems that if I set this up per module/collection or button, I can customize the form screen differently for each button or collection. This means that changing the form screen for one button or action won’t affect the form screens in other places when I add a new record to that collection. In other words, if I want each form to look different per button or action, I can make them different each time without affecting the others.
On the other hand, when using actions like “Edit” or “Show Details,” it appears to work differently. If I change the detail screen once per table, it will affect the outcome no matter where I access it from in the app, across multiple access points. This means that any changes made to the detail screen will be reflected everywhere that screen is used for that particular table or collection.
Am I correct in my understanding of these behaviors? I want to ensure that I’m thinking about this correctly. Additionally, if anyone has any deeper insights or lessons to share about these behaviors, I would greatly appreciate it. I’m always eager to learn more!
The Add allows you to add a row to a table… you can do this from any tab or screen you are on… so you can customize the form to look differently as you mentioned. You can also use the same form if you make it a custom action and if you are using it from 2 screens that have the same source table …
My advice is always make a custom action (create new action) … even if it had one action add form . that way you can call the same form if you need to again.
The Edit action allows you to edit 1 row in a table… it can be called if the current screen is based on that row…or if you are editing a related row. All edit actions on the same table have the same layout… if you want to change that, there is a workaround. Again you have to create a custom action with the show edit screen action & add to that set column actions that updates “user specific” columns in the row or preferably in the users table. That way inside the form you can use visibility conditions to display or hide certain fields you want to show.
For example in an asset management app I have edit actions that edit the asset row…but i update a user specific column in my user profile row… action/type… so that when the form is open i check what the type value is… if its “edit price” i display financial fields only, if its “edit location” i display only location fields etc…
you could create custom forms using overlay screens,if you want to avoid putting a lot of visibility conditions… but the disadvantage there is if you decide to cancel an edit… the values would have already been saved (if you are not writing to a helper table … which i advice you don’t try until you find the above clear :slight)