April Interface Designer Updates

[Jordan_Scott1]

Hi all -

I hope the week is going well. I’m excited to be able to share the next wave of Interface Designer updates targeted at making interfaces even more powerful and easier to use.

• Button Element: Allows you to add a button - and configure some actions - in your interface. This will allow you to quickly approve/reject requests and gives flexibility to making status changes like assigned or complete.
  • You’ll be able to configure buttons to update a field or multiple fields of a single record with a single click. You may also choose to move to the next record.
  • You’ll be able to edit the color from 4 different options. Below are the color options and their labels. These labels are meant to be guiding principles of when to use these colors, not what they do.
    • Blue = “Primary”
    • Red = “Warning”
    • Green = “Success”
    • Gray = “Secondary”

• Calendar Element: offers the same functionality as the calendar view in an Interface. It includes the ability to customize the initial view that visitors see. This is a great way to manage your editorial/campaign calendars or to coordinate releases with product partners.

• Duplicate Element & Duplicate Interface: Duplicate an element within an interface or duplicate an entire interface. This cuts down the time spent designing your interface and makes it easy to replicate, or just utilize as a starting point.

• Right-aligned headers: Now you can put elements (like a button 👀 ) on the right-side of your header.

Additional Resources:

• Support: Duplicating an interface
• Support: Button element

If you don’t see these changes reflected right away, please try clearing your cache, and let us know your thoughts below!

[Databaser]

Tobias_LGKR:

or am I missing something here

You can add a checkboxfield (or other) that triggers an automation that creates a new record. That’s the workaround some of us use.

[Tobias_LGKR]

Databaser:

You can add a checkboxfield (or other) that triggers an automation that creates a new record. That’s the workaround some of us use.

Thanks for the pointer. Yes, I do as well. I just don’t understand why any database interface would not have a native function to create a new record as its first priority. Creating records is the lifeblood of any database.

[Ellen_Edgerton]

I agree - this is a terrible change! It makes the element virtually useless. All it shows is the title of the record, and doesn’t even allow you to click on it!

[Joe_Hewes]

The card (and original look) becomes available again if you change the element to “editable”. This also reveals an “add record” option.

[Kai_Muscher]

Hello everyone! This Button Element is a cool update, and definitely a step in the right direction.

If a BUTTON could help to update status of linked records, that would be fantastic. But that’s not possible as far as I can see, correct?

[kuovonne]

Kai_Muscher:

If a BUTTON could help to update status of linked records, that would be fantastic. But that’s not possible as far as I can see, correct?

My understanding is that currently a button element can only directly update values for the current record, not linked records.

In order to affect a linked record, you could have one of the data changes trigger an automation that affects the linked record. Or have the data change be looked up (or rolled up) to the linked record, and then have the rolled up value trigger the automation.

But these are all multi-step systems.

[Christian_Heins]

Amazing functionality! With it we can also trigger automations and scripts.

[Mark_Newton]

Happy to see the work being done and reading through the issues and hot fixes with the button elements is informative.

I want to point out another feature that seems to have been lost in the update, and that is opening the lookup card of a linked record from the grey box in a grid element (see pic.), this is now static. I don’t think this is an ‘editable’ vs ‘not editable’ issue, because the grid element never had that parameter, they are always editable.

[Karlstens]

Finally made time to check the new Button feature on my log parser Interface.

A few thoughts;

• The button name and the appearance text look linked - which seems redundant to have both.
• I can’t find a method to remove the lightning bolt. Interface authors may use Emoji icons if they’d like icons in their buttons.
• The colours are handy, but unfortunately not state based (ie, once a button is clicked, it can’t remain toggled off).
• There aren’t any other interesting button workflows to test, such as “Copy Field Text” (which is what I’m personally waiting for. One of my interfaces returns a base64 string, and I just want to be able to click a button and have that text in my clipboard to paste elsewhere. )

General improvements I’d like to see;

• Ability to add more colours to interface regions. A variety of varying Colours tied to rows would be great, but really we also need colour to differentiate regions of the interface itself, both columns, rows, individual cells etc.
• Colour rules based either off the base, or granular colour rules at the interface level.
• When I’m clicking through different records, I want to see the interface change colours accordingly with each record and applying colour rules.
• Tighter control of whitespace would be appreciated.
• The ability to link an Interface grid to a views properties. At the moment, users can only copy view properties, which means if the view updates within the Base then the interface still operates off of the previous view settings used when originally copied. I see both copy view properties and linking view properties useful in their own right, so would love to see both options.

Edit:
Further to my last post, I have been getting this disconnection error a few times a day lately.

EDIT 2: Anyone else having Filters fail to filter their Interface? Mine are simply failing to do anything. :thinking: Oh wait, re-editing my Interface, I see that “Connections” to elements are a thing… have they always been a thing? I don’t remember setting them up… anyway, I am liking what I see! How cool! Working again :blush:

[Harry_O_Brien]

way too much white, some options for a coloured top nav bar would be nice