It would be helpful if we could map hotkeys to the keyboard that could have stand-alone triggers.
Example:
When you type something into google you instinctively press enter to submit instead of clicking the search button. This may sound like just a minor Quality-Of-Life addition but this would improve the UX for our internal customers in ways that would reflect positive for Tulip as a platform, leading the conversation to promote more instances and licenses.
hello @joey.wheeler, thanks for posting!! are you familiar with the following Keyboard Shortcuts from the App Builder??
based on what I’m understanding, this should help the quality of life you’re mentioning.
does this make sense?? let me know if you have further questions!!
My apologies. I meant for the app user to type into a text box and press enter to activate a trigger sequence.
I do have exactly the same question / issue. To ease the use of my created Tulip apps for the end users I need to assign triggers to specific keyboard keys, e.g. the “enter” key to run a search trigger via a connector function.
This would not only improve the usability for the end user but also speed up process times due to less changes from the keyboard to the mouse (for clicking buttons) as the used input device.
Is no one from the tulip community reading this topic?
Bumping this request.
Hi @joey.wheeler, @Alex-
We are considering implementing this, and think it would be very useful, but have no specific timeline as of yet. Thanks for posting, we will keep you updated if things change.
This would be great for us too.
Any timeline yet?
Hey @Nolsie,
There is a feature in the final stages of testing that will enable this sort of functionality (along with a lot more). Right now it is being tested by a small group of customers as part of the final stages of the release process.
As part of my testing, I’ve made basically exactly this, an input that fires a trigger on a few different conditions (user types any key, user types a specific key, user types something that matches a regex string, user types a string containing a substring, etc.). This upcoming feature will enable this and a whole lot more.
This feature should be going live on 4/13, and there will be a lot more information about this functionality when it is available to the wider community.
Thanks for the patience. This is functionality that we wanted to make sure we did the right way,
Pete
What is this feature called/how do I use it?
I’m also searching for this feature. Where do I find it?
This thread kicked off a lot of conversation with the product team around the right way to approach this. So the underlying feature I was referring to is Custom Widgets..
Custom widgets allow you to make just about anything into an interactive widget in Tulip. In this we want an input with special behavior. I made a quick tip video this morning building an example of this functionality.
When talking to natively supporting this functionality, it gets a little tricky for a few reasons:
Do these limitations make sense? You can absolutely get around them with custom widgets, if you are willing to accept the caveats they come with (we will never use enter in a data entry use-case and we are ok with it always advancing steps).
If you are interested I can share this widget specifically and you can import it and play with it.
Pete
Hey Pete,
your limitations totally make sense to me. I’ve now tried your approach and created three custom widgets: one for number inputs, one for integer and one for text. I’ve also added the option to scale the text and change the text color, so I can use it almost like the standard inputs.
Unfortunately this solution is hardly subsequently useable for already finished apps as I cannot copy triggers to a custom widget and therefore would have to recreate every trigger in the custom widget.
It would also not be easy to implement and maintain this feature if I want to give the user teh option whether to use the “Enter” key or a button instead as this would mean that I have to create and maintain every trigger / function twice as I have many applications where I use triggers to run a connector function, evaluate the results of the connector, write data to a table, ect. in one step.
I was already thinking of creating a button as a custom widget which can also be used with the “Enter” key - but if I understand the custom widget feature correctly, this is only possible when the custom widget is selected with the cursor first, right?
Anyway, thanks for your great support - the video helped me a lot!
Hey @Alex -
Welcome to the custom widget gang!
This is a painpoint I often face too. The limited copy-ability of triggers is a really quality of life issue that makes it tricky to have multiple different avenues to do similar things (I often see this if I want either an input or a barcode scan to do something). This is something we want to address, and I am doing what I can to accelerate this feature request above others. This isn’t a small project on the engineering side, so it is a little tricker to sneak into a little free engineering time.
There is a bunch of work ongoing right now to improve triggers, and it will go a long way to obsolete this need, but you may not see the outcome of that work until late 2022. We are trying to avoid investing several weeks of engineering bandwidth into a feature that will be unnecessary in a few months, but there might be a middle ground we can strike so you aren’t waiting for 6 months to have a better solution.
I really appreciate the feedback-
Pete
Hey All-
With r236 (and eventually, LTS9) you can now add triggers that fire on enter for text and number inputs.
Along with this, Triggers can be added to any other input that will fire when the widget is interacted with.
Thanks for the great ideas all. This wouldn’t have happened without your ask-
Pete
