Dividers or Grouping needed in App item screens
Some of our app items are 2 or more screens long. That's a lot of fields and I personally find this makes the forms more confusing than they need to be. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Usually there are some logical groupings that would help break up the page... but I can't see any practical way to do this.
Could you please make some basic elements available to us to divide the forms up a little?
At the simplest level this could be resolved with simple "Horizontal Rules" ie HR tags... And maybe a "Heading" element... each of which are standard html elements and should be pretty simple to add in a new field group.
<HR>
Perhaps in a later release, you could look at a more advanced solution of "Groups" which could be added to the page (html DIVs) that have a heading and perhaps user selectable colours...
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Official comment
Hi everyone,
So far this feature request has not been prioritized by the team as we have a few work-arounds for you to add section headers in your apps.
Here is a few options -
Simple
Use a category field with a required field to become "header" in your app. See screenshot below:
Advanced
Use a calculation field with a javascript calculation to create a header image, using colors and text of your choice. See screenshots below:
Hope this will help you with a work-around. At this point we have no specific plans on the "header/divider" field option since we have these available.
However please keep the votes coming in case you would prefer to see a real solution, rather than this workaround.
//Sara - Podio
Comment actions -
Hi Glenn,
Thank you for sharing this feedback.
As you know app templates are open to be modified as you please, and you could for example make a general rule for a max number of fields to be added to an app. Maybe it will be more relevant to have several apps with relationship fields to link to each other instead of few apps with a large number of fields?
We will monitor this thread for more feedback.
/Mette
-Podio -
I agree with Glenn. Some basic headers would go a long way in organizing an app template. For example:
We have a work request app that has fields that need to be filled out at the beginning and end of the process. Being able to separate these by a header would make it more clear to our users which fields need to be filled out at each point. Ideally, we would like to group these fields together and make them collapsible.
I agree some of these issues can be solved by splitting up a large app but there are definitely cases out there where having everything in one app makes the most sense.
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Thank you very much for sharing your input here Christopher. Maybe a webform solution could also work for what you're describing? https://help.podio.com/hc/en-us/articles/201019628-Webforms
Thanks again for your feedback - it is noted:-)
/Mette
- Podio -
Hi Mette
What we have is a booking enquiry form that contains 20+ fields. They are all necessary and splitting them out into multiple apps would create unnecessary complication for the users.
I think adding some simple horizontal lines (and headings ideally) would be a very simple request to accommodate and would make a great deal of difference to usability on a daily basis.
Thanks for your ongoing consideration.
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Hi Glenn,
Thank you for clarifying this.
Changing the UI is a larger project that affect overall layout, so we will need careful consideration when going into a project like you're describing.
We will keep monitoring the space here to get a feeling of the demands out there.
/Mette
- Podio -
Dittto Ditto ... so many many companies are focussing on making information simpler .. we need to be able to split up an item view into 'bitesize' bits of information .. all too often another field is added to an app and no one seems to think about how much scrolling up and down needs to be done, the suggestion to make more apps just does not work always.
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Glenn,
I'm not sure if this will help you or not but I figured out that you can insert headers and line breaks by using a calculation field and markdown. A calculation field has to reference another field but you can just stick it in a variable and output markdown text. Here's some examples:
Header Text Example
var blank = @Name Of A Random Field
'Header Text === \n'Line Break Example
var blank = @Name Of A Random Field
'---\n' -
Christopher, Thank you!
I ended up merging your suggestions as follows:
var blank = @somevariable
'Booking Details\n===\n---\n'So I ended up with a heading AND a horizontal rule.
You are a legend.
(Podio, this will do as a workaround... but my request stands. I don't think we should have to work around this.)
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Glenn,
You're welcome! I agree this is good workaround but something that should be native to Podio. There just needs to be two more "field types" that you can drag over, one for HR and one for headers. This wouldn't require any change in the Podio UI and would be extremely easy to implement. They could even just be a wrapper for a calculation field that adds the markdown for you.
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True... although I think it'd be best not to use the calculation field as (at least for me) the header and horizontal rule aren't visible when adding a new entry, not until it's saved.
Fortunately given that the devs can add dragable form elements that have to be updated, verified, linked to other fields (for calculations) and stored in databases... then a header and horizontal rule should be pretty simple for them :)
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I concur, Podio is powerful but the interface is awkward. Groupings, HR's, headings, colors, all urgently needed. I would also suggest being able to put more than one field on a line, and control over the amount of vertical space between lines. Currently I would say there should be about double the number of fields vertically per page to avoid so much scrolling.
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@Charlie thanks for acknowledging this post. My question for you is given this request was posted 11 months ago, why haven't we seen even a simple solution?
Although I don't know the Podio code specifically, as an ex web developer with 15 years experience it seems to me that adding a Horizontal Rule or Basic Heading option to the list of selectable "Fields" would be EXTREMELY simple for your brilliant developers. A heading might be the best option, as it could be filled with characters to appear as a divider eg "--------HEADING---------"
Could this request PLEASE be considered as a two part request?
1) ASAP Implement simple Horizontal Rule or Heading as a divider to the "Fields" lists
2) Implement something more advanced as per the other suggestions within this thread.Thanks, Glenn
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This is not a huge development this is without a doubt someone's dislike for headers and page breaks because I am mind blown this doesn't exist. Don't expect this feature any time soon I came from zoho crm 3 years ago and this was the first feature I noticed was absent. Great system thanks for everything but this genuinely could not be a more basic request
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Note: it's easy to insert a divider by making a calculation field that generates a literal value of a straight line. The name of the field can be capitalised to increase the effect of a "header", while labelling the section. The only advantage of a "Horizontal Rule" feature would be to save you copying and pasting the JavaScript, and possibly a more compact layout.
Search this forum,.. It's in here! -
@Steve Yes that's the workaround I use also... but there's a significant weakness with that method - those calculation fields are not visible when creating a NEW entry.
Anyway, in case it helps @Tyler though, this is the header code I've been using.
var blank = @select_a_field_from_your_form
'Booking Details\n===\n---\n'In that example, the words "Booking Details" shows as a nice bold heading.
The field names for my separator calculations are simply (1), (2), (3) etc going down the page so they are distinct but not too visually distracting - see below.
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I'd like to echo the hundreds of other people I've seen request this feature on this and other threads, sites, blogs etc. Such a simple thing that would make such a difference.
My use case for this is that I want to be able to create a call script app for my team to work from when handling customers. I could break the script into sections and also leave instructions at various points for people to follow. Obviously the instructions would need to be pre-populated on any new items created which is why the current workarounds don't work.
You're actually already 90% of the way to delivering this. Have a look at the image below, which shows an excerpt from my call script app with a made-up example:
The "Script Guidelines" section is just a multi-line text field, something that anyone can add to an existing app item and style however they want.
In other words, pretty much all you need to do is make it possible to pre-populate text fields in the app template. Add a "pre-populate" option to your text field type and allow people to enter whatever value they want on the app template so it appears on every new item. This would solve my use case and every other mentioned in this thread as far as I can see.
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Thanks to @Glenn for the graphic inspiration here - nice. We extended with jump-to links at the page top to make the form easier to navigate:
a) Insert a calculation field at the top of your form, for navigation (eg 'Jump To')
b) Use this calculation formula (note the links must be lower case for some reason, even if the destinations are title or upper case - took us a while to figure that out):waste=@Name;
"[1 Contract](#contract) | [2 Needs](#needs) | [3 Solution](#solution) | [4 Finances](#finances) | [5 Schedule](#schedule)";c) Then add the matching anchor / title fields
1)
waste=@Name;
"# Contract\n---\n";2)
waste=@Name;
'# Needs\n---\n';3)
waste=@Name;
"# Solution\n---\n";4)
waste=@Name;
"# Finances\n---\n";5)
waste=@Name;
"# Schedule\n---\n";We still have an unresolved problem - how to add a 'return to top' option - when we added these into the calculation fields, it broke the link for some reason.
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