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Thumbnail issues and other smaller problems.

Topic Labels: Data Interface Designer Views
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Phaderon
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping some of these questions can be answered simply or, at the very least, passed along to the developers who might implement some of these features in the future. I'm currently on a trial of it and I represent our organization that wants to use these functionalities to build little dashboards and tools to help our teams and colleagues scattered across the country. I was recommended this service by AI, in fact, when I was asking for specific features I need. It's amazing what it can do and I'm clicking around and building things that are really going to make a difference and be useful.

However, I've come across a few stumbling blocks that are quite frustrating. Unless I can find a way around them, I don't know if I can recommend using this for our organization.

Firstly, there's the issue of displaying attachments/thumbnails. I had this idea of creating a records overview where users could click down the side to show different entries. I'm trying to build a vacancy database where people can submit vacancies for various job positions, fill in their details, and submit it. It's an advertising platform for this purpose, showing job details, contact information, and any attachments like CVs and job descriptions. I've got it in a tiled format and it looks really good. I've added different parts to it and colour-coded other bits. It looks fantastic, but the irritating issue I've come across is the displaying of thumbnail images.

I've added an attachments column in my dataset that has two things in it: a banner and an avatar. Both of them contain the same logo. We have 8 locations around the country and each has its own logo and style, so I've incorporated these into the fields. The problem is, when I display them, they just don't appear in any logical way. You click on a tile and it opens up the banner, which is much wider than it is tall (because it's a banner), inside a massive square. You see a sliver of the banner, which fits the width of where I want it to display, but it pads the top and bottom with so much empty space that it's insane. It's unusable in fact, taking up nearly half of the screen just for what I consider a small image. I have been through every setting that I can see, clicked every button that I can find, and I can't find a way to make that image nice and tight at the top of the screen. I just want it to be a header for when they click on each of the cards, but I can't seem to do it.

I've gone back to AI to see if it can help me, and it claims there used to be a feature that allows you to change the width or height, but I can't see it anywhere. It's bringing in a lookup column of the attachments, which is essential. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. This issue extends to attachments in general. I have another project that shows a newsletter each week with attachments, but the attachments field in the record view I'm using has massive squares for thumbnails of the image files. This looks okay in certain situations, but I just want it to be a line of text that says something like "document.pdf" with maybe the PDF logo or Word logo, or even nothing with just a download button. Instead, it's a preview square, which takes up too much room for people trying to click through. I cannot find any way of changing it. I can either make it massive or make it a small square, but I can't make it a simple line or anything like that. This all ties in with the attachments column itself. Displaying it in a way that's presentable for the people I deal with is not easy.

The second frustrating issue I've come across is sharing this out. I've created a little dashboard with a few interfaces. I've made multiple interfaces for each team so they can land on the interface and click onto the left of each team area to browse for specific job positions. However, the UI tells me you can only publicly share pages, and you cannot go further back than that. I would have to share all 8 pages with 8 different public links, which is actually pointless because it means they'll have 8 different URLs to click on each time to look at different jobs. It'd be such a nice feature if you could just share the entire dashboard where they can land on the interface and click through all the little tabs and areas I've made, but it doesn't seem possible.

Lastly, just a minor gripe: when setting up some of these views and records view, there are a few data entries, columns, and fields that I don't want visible. I want these fields to be seen only under certain situations. For example, the form works perfectly in that way; I can set each field to appear only when it meets certain criteria, which is beautiful, but I can't do it in the view, records view, or any other view in the interface. There is something called visibility rules which, when I click on it, asks for more money or an upgrade to my current license. I don't know what that button does; it sounds like it might solve my problem, but I'm not 100% certain. Right now, my entry has 5 to 6 empty columns just sitting there with their column headers, and it doesn't look professional. I want them to be hidden unless they contain data.

These issues make it difficult to recommend the service to my organization. They're waiting for my reply on it to possibly get a couple of licenses to start using it. I really think it could help our organization, but these problems are significant for us. It needs to do what we need for our organization, otherwise, we're taking a step back from what we're currently using.

I'm still learning it, so some one-on-one tool tips would be really helpful as I want the interface to function as I envision it: they click this, it appears on the screen. But getting it to happen has been a bit of a struggle. I've been diving in and out of AI and looking at the help text and documentation, which often seems quite old—it shows outdated screenshots and mentions buttons that don't exist anymore.

Any help or advice on the above would be greatly appreciated. I apologize for the lengthy message, but it's important as this is an investment for our organization. I want to make sure it works right before advocating for purchasing additional licenses. Ideally, we want to get this up and running to potentially reach tens of thousands of our staff members and maybe even more, given that we're an educational organization. We could potentially send it out to a younger audience, reaching over 100,000 viewers.

I'm keen to get this working and set up, but I can't figure out if the functionality is there or how to access it if it is. Any help and advice is very much appreciated, and I'm happy to provide more detail on any of the topics.

Kind regards

1 Reply 1

There is something called visibility rules which, when I click on it, asks for more money or an upgrade to my current license. I don't know what that button does; it sounds like it might solve my problem, but I'm not 100% certain. Right now, my entry has 5 to 6 empty columns just sitting there with their column headers, and it doesn't look professional. I want them to be hidden unless they contain data.

Yeap that does exactly what you need, lets you set a conditional that'll show/hide a field the same way the form one works

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I don't think there's a way around the attachment field stuff I'm afraid; may want to open a support ticket directly to confirm!  For the link thing, it's a bit clunky, but you could share a view that has links to the 8 other views?  Not ideal, but would at least provide a single place for all those links to exist