See Exactly What Your Users See in a Knack App

I've been requested a bunch of times by my Knack database clients to give them a view where they can see exactly what their users see on the screen. Usually this is because they might be training the user, or troubleshooting something ... Could be a number of reasons for this. There are probably several different approaches to accomplish this with Knack, but here I go through one I often use that is quite simple and works very well. Note, this method only works with the user is assigned to something like a market, company, or region ... You can assign yourself to one of those see all the views and data. It won't work all the data is assigned to an individual themselves ( ... an email address).

Here's a related post that you might like: https://www.knackbuilders.com/post/require-users-to-change-their-password-in-a-knack-app

Interested in my Knack database app services? ... Book a call with me here: https://calendly.com/daveparrish/callwithdave

Full Transcript

0:01 Hey folks, Dave Parrish here with another video. I'm just going to jump right into this. Here's today's topic. See exactly what your users see. 0:13 I've done a bunch of apps, involved apps, and they have a lot of different users. One I'm going to go through an example today. 0:20 They have these things called international reps, and they're in a bunch of different countries throughout the world. And they have managers back at the admin side. 0:31 They're responsible, let's say, for a market. And especially when we're deploying this or even down the road when we're helping these international reps, these users get to know the app or if there's an issue or we need to know how to do something. 0:46 These managers request from me. They say, hey, I want to see exactly what this person is seeing in front of their screen so I can help them do what they do or if I need to troubleshoot a problem, I know what they have, I can get the screen shots, whatever, that type of thing. 1:01 There's probably a number of different approaches you can do with this. But I'm going to go through the one that works for me on this app. 1:09 Thank you.

0:01 Okay, here's the lowdown. Now you can have users out there will have people in the admin see exactly what your users are seeing for a number of different reasons you might want. 0:14 Let me call up an admin. I'll just show you how it works in the front app, and then I'm gonna just show you how it's built in the backend. 0:24 It's not, it's complicated. Here's a, here's an app, it's an accounting app. These reps, I'm gonna go to rep home. 0:33 They do invoices, they check their balances on the money they can spend, all kinds of things. But I put this thing here. 0:40 It's called, and this by the way is only visible to admins. I'll show you how that's done. Now, right now we're in a market China, and I got all this stuff. 0:50 You can see all their stuff. They perform all kinds of actions. Again, they're making they're coming up with activities they want to do to promote something that gets approved. 0:58 If it's approved, they can go do it and then use that activity. They can expense against it on invoices, a whole bunch of stuff, but it's involved and it takes, there's a learning curve. 1:11 So the marketing managers back home want to be able to walk people through with exactly what is on the screen and they both can share it. 1:18 And by the way, it's a good practice if you're ever sharing stuff. It's a similar thing or the same thing. 1:23 Have one person drive and then maybe switch, refresh a lot. Don't be working on the same thing at the same time. 1:31 It's a best practice. But here, This is China and let's say this marketing man is also responsible for some other country, which is the case here. 1:41 They can just click on this and say, Hey, what? I'm not China. I now want to be. Let's come up with another one. 1:50 Central America right here. It refreshes. Now they're Central America. They see exactly all the functions are the same for all of them, but all the data is going to be different. 2:01 And here's how we do that. First of all, the way it's structured international reps, they're assigned to a market. They can be assigned to more than one. 2:10 That's how that is, but to make this work admin we're going to make admin a multiple user role. So this, this is admin international rep admin. 2:26 So a lot of times in apps, I only do multiple user roles when we're building because it's a lot easier to go back and forth between roles instead of having to log in and then log in or log out and log in. 2:42 But in this case, it makes sense to have both. That's why you see up here, they're admin home and they're also rep. 2:49 If you sign people, the two roles, it's going to show up in these tabs. They're separate entities. That's if you build it when they're based around user roles and that's how I view it. I do most tabs. 2:58 They're completely separate. Here's rep home. Here's admin home. They're different. So they'll show up as tabs up here. But you probably get my point here. 3:07 Back to data. Come on. We're going to make the international rep, ah, more than one user role being admin and international rep. 3:22 Then go over to the pages side. Remember this thing is only for the admins. So it's a piece of content. 3:28 It's own content there. I'm going to go over here. Let's go to admin home or rep home and we got this piece of content right here that allows you to switch because we don't want the reps having this access to this because they have no business. 3:47 And the rep has to, this works if it's, the rep is assigned to something and the data that's populated is assigned to that something. 3:55 It could be a, in this case it's a market. It could be a company. It could be a division. It doesn't matter. 4:02 Where you can do that. Change another user to be assigned to that same thing that's going to populate with that stuff. But we just have one rule up here that says, hey, in this case, if the user rule, you can approach this in different ways, but if the user rule does not contain admin, there's an admin, 4:22 in the user rules or individual's user rules, uh, hide, change market. So as rep is only going to only, are only going to be a rep, they won't have admin in there, so the admins don't see it. 4:34 It works really well. When I first started building and having clients, I had this requested of me and I didn't even think about approaching it this way. 4:42 I think I built out a section for the admin that was exactly the same. I copied a bunch of stuff and maybe I had built some new stuff. 4:50 But that's not the way to do it. It takes too much time and anytime you make a change in one, you gotta know to go manage it, make the change in the other one. 4:59 That's there's a number of different ways to do this. I'm highlighting this one. The way I just told you is not the way to do it. 5:05 That's what I got here. I hope you appreciate it. Thanks.

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