Today I'm talking about buttons (or menus) in your Knack database app. I'll discuss different methods to make and manage them, and when to use buttons instead of page tabs. Please check it out. Thanks!
Here's an other post that you might like: https://www.knackbuilders.com/post/users-in-a-knack-database-app
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Full Transcript
0:00 Hey folks, Dave Parrish here back with another video like these if you can on YouTube Today's topic is the lowdown on buttons with Knack What I'm talking about is this thing like book and intro call you can use them all over for all kinds of things. 0:17 There's a few different ways to make them, a few different ways to manage them in terms of their use. Sometimes buttons are good, sometimes tabs are good. 0:28 Uhm, I'm just going to jump into this and, We'll talk about those. Buttons.
0:01 Okay, let's jump into this. Buttons is the topic for today. Here's just a test app, here's one. This is a typical structure I do. 0:10 On your main page, you're going to have something that's most important to you. That might be contacts, customers, invoices. And right above that I always have a button. 0:19 It's add new. Let's see how you make those. Two different ways, right here. Add new. You can do this, go down to menu. 0:27 Menu means buttons, but it can be more than one button. And you're going to say what table. You're going to say link to a new page. 0:36 And by the way, all this stuff is pretty basic. This is more for newer folks. But it took me a while to get this under, under control here. 0:43 You're going to add a new page. Let's just call it uhm. I'll add new or whatever. And this will make the button itself. 0:55 Okay. And then you're going to go, once you save it, just like anything, you're going to drive down to what's underneath that and build your content. 1:04 But there's a quicker way to do it too. I'm going to get rid of this. And I actually did not know this for a while when I first started building. 1:15 You can say add new and go straight to the form. Skip the button making step. And let's say we want a button that says add new unit. 1:27 Right here. And then this thing here. Link to this form from a menu. And just watch this. This is a. 1:36 Plain form on the page with the table. Which I don't like doing but I see it a lot. You just click that. 1:43 It turns that into a button. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna add it here. This type of button where you're adding something. 1:52 Making new or even editing. I have a strong preference uhm for making that a modal pop up. And every time you do that is a few steps. 2:02 I wish this would be all automated but I think lots of builders just do the same thing. They go to it. 2:08 They go to settings. Display modal pop up. And if you don't want to side click to close it you do this. 2:16 Okay you have to do that. Now it's a modal pop up. And uhm you have to do it. But a couple of other things to clean it up. 2:25 One, we're going to engage the form. We're going to go to settings. And we're going to get rid of add unit. 2:32 The title. Because in a modal pop up that appears up above. So you don't want the add unit. And you're going to do one other thing. 2:44 In almost all cases this is how you want it. Rules, submit rule. The submit rule defaults to show a message. 2:52 I much rather prefer to redirect the parent page. And it goes back to where you were and you see that table and probably depending on how you're asserting it, it's going to be a brand new record there for you to deal with. 3:06 Uhm, so that's how you make them.
0:01 Okay, well one more thing on how you make them. Here's this piece of content add new it's a button This is one single piece of contact you can see it's engaged Now you want more buttons All you do is add another one I'm just going to do it and there it is now with all these two you can add an icon next 0:23 to them let's say this one add I do this often usually at the end of a project or you can put a plus sign it sort of makes it look better but these are all one piece of content so whatever is here is going to be driven I'm going to get into a minute in fact let me get into it right now here's a different 0:43 app and there's a bunch of buttons next I'm going to get into these buttons versus tabs up top but here's one piece of content that's this row that's top row there's another piece of content they're all buttons let's just go to it right here let me make this bigger let me make these smaller in this one 1:14 we have these two pieces of content we got this top level of buttons and we have the bottom level of buttons and I did this on purpose this particular app has admins but within the admin user role there's a full access or limited access so to make this easy I put all the full access stuff up top and 1:42 the ones that limited below so with the one page rule right here you can see if this is admin, full access is yes, no, is no, it's going to hide this whole piece of content right here. 1:57 This is just for the finance people. That makes it easier. So when you're doing buttons you might think about how you want them grouped if you're going to deal with that. 2:06 There could be other use cases on how you're going to do it. Now let's talk about one more thing here. 2:12 Tabs versus buttons. I see a lot of new app builders uhm go crazy with tabs. I did a whole video on that. 2:21 How page layout 101, how not to screw up your apps. But sometimes they're useful, a balance of them. The point is if you're navigating, nesting down via buttons and you want to get to something else. 2:37 Like these are, I won't get into what these tables are but they're. They're important. You have to navigate back. If these tabs are in here you have to navigate back and then navigate to where you want to go. 2:49 If something you want to grab a lot you can just click here go right to it. So just think about it. 2:56 Think about it how you want to navigate what's the easiest to navigate for your user and it's a good experience for them. 3:05 Uhm, one other thing with buttons, let me go back to this thing. In terms of managing them. If you change this name, I did another video on this. 3:15 Let's for example, this says new, add new unit and I just wanted to say add unit instead. Okay, hey that looks good. 3:26 Well you're not quite done if you want to be thorough. That just changed. This is just cosmetic. It's what appears on the button. 3:34 Then you can go down to where you are. This is the content on there and go to settings and you're going to see the name of it. 3:43 So that's going to be the name. The top of your modal popup says add new unit and you just change it. 3:48 You just want to say add new or add unit. And the URL ah has the same thing. So if you want it to be thorough. 3:56 This is, that's what I do. You're going to. Redo these so it's all consistent. That's what I got on buttons. 4:06 This actually took me a little longer than I thought. I appreciate you watching. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you.