Table Record Improvements: Clear and Copy Record

Two suggestions on table records which would be nice to have:

  1. Clear Record
    It would be a huge time saver to add the ability to clear the selected record’s data, instead of clearing each individual column for that record.

  2. Copy Record
    If there were such a method to ‘copy’ a record from one table to another table (columns need to match of course), that would be so useful instead of copying each individual column. This becomes painful with many columns.

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Hey Jim, thanks for the suggestions! Can you tell me more about a situation where you want to copy a record? I am building another feature that may solve this problem.

Sure Kevin - I have two identical tables, one of which is an active table and the other is a historical table. In short, when the active table is considered no longer active (complete), it will ‘archive’ or copy all the data from that record into a new record in the historical table, and reset the active table’s data to blanks.

My tables are 30+ columns wide which was a bit time consuming to setup a copy of each column from active to historical.

The sequence of events for the data is:

  1. Active table holds all current data of a process

  2. When deemed complete and to archive, all of the active table data is copied into a separate table for historical data

  3. Once all of the data was copied, the active table record then must clear its own data to make way for new data of the next process (ID stays the same)

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Hey Jim, I took a look at the table you mentioned. One suggestion on how to reduce this burden in the first place- rather than have 30+ fields with booleans and text values, have you considered using one text field in the table and then adding text to that field every time a check is passed?

So, the field would be called “Checks Passed” and the values in an individual row would be like “Check1,Check2,Check3”

Then, in your app logic, you could look at that field in the table record and see if it “contains” a certain text value to indicate that the product has passed a certain threshold.

The thought did cross the mind, however, if a user were to mark something complete but it actually wasn’t and goes back in to correct, it could be complex to find and replace the type of check & value of what was marked off. It also would not allow for easy viewing of historical data unless post-table processing was added to split off the commas.

Great news! We just launched a solution called the “History Widget”. Check it out here: http://support.tulip.co/en/articles/4511667-using-the-history-widget-to-approve-table-records-changes

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