It’s been said on this forum before, but one feature that is absolutely crucial for list blocks is adding a “group by” feature. I am using Airtable, and have found it surprising and frustrating how the three options for presenting the list: 1) embedding a view from airtable (problem: does not allow for inline editing), 2) creating an airtable interface, which allows for inline editing (problem: is not supported to embed in softr), or 3) create a list block directly in softr (problem: does not offer a “group by” feature). For my case specifically, each week my team is scraping through upwards of 5 unique papers, and assigning 40+ experts to review each paper, thus it is essential to be able to create a view where each paper can be distinguished. While this is not yet a feature, if anyone has potential intermediate solutions while we wait for this to be an offered that would be greatly appreciated!
Also missing the group-by functionality that’s in Airtable but doesn’t cross-over to Softr natively.
I have a workaround that suits my purposes well enough and maybe it will get your creative juices flowing, even if not of direct use to you:
Using the Airtable formula function:
WEEKNUM()
with date (record created) fields has proved to be helpful for me. Combine using it with NOW to identify records (created) that fall in the current week to set a filtering variable.
If a Softr block is set with conditions to only show records created in the current week, perhaps you’ll get to see
each week my team is scraping through upwards of 5 unique papers,
so you can assign(ing) 40+ experts to review each paper
That deals with a single, current week. I appreciate you might be looking for groupings for all weeks 1-52 … well, that’s 52 duplicate blocks on one page! Or … could you group previous weeks into months, and sorted in date order, to reduce that number?
Hey Mark, thank you for your reply! Rather than grouping by date, it is more essential for me to be able to group by paper because various team members specialize in each paper. It can easily be done through grouping by record ID on the Airtable interface, but not in Softr…
Hi @Jjenglert. Can you please expand one what you mean by this? You are correct, I can very easily group and associate my records on airtable, through views, interfaces, etc. What I’m not sure is how to have this grouping be translated to lists on Softr. For example, I have a base with two tables: 1) A table describing an article and its attributes (authors, date published, title, etc), and 2) A table linked to table 1 through the article’s ID, with records that have potential reviewers corresponding to each article. I can easily group table 2 by the article ID, but when I pull table 2 into a list on Softr, those groupings get lost, and I see a scrambled list of various articles and their proposed reviewers. How are you suggesting this “group by” article ID be solved on Softr. Thanks!
Hey @MarkSchofield! Sorry, I will try to be a little more clear. I am not grouping papers together. My reply to JJenglert below might help, but I am grouping lists of authors, corresponding to a specific paper they have been assigned to. The grouping is simply being done by my article ID field on Airtable. I appreciate your willingness to help! My ideal view would be similar to the interface or views airtable can create, which offer the ability to group by a certain field, while right now softr only offers the ability to group by a field if it is a “single select” (ie only options 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc), which does not work with my model because the preprints are constantly changing, and not always in a clean manner (some may be needed to be viewed/edited by my users for over a week, while others may only take a day).
Certainly! I added a screenshot of list that softr provides me, with the articles not ordered, and below that the view that I can get from airtable with the groupings in order. Unfortunately, I am not able to edit embedded views of airtable, which is critical for my workflow. I have a similar airtable interface which is even better, allowing for inline editing, but that is not allowed by airtable to be embedded.
Initial thoughts are that it will be hard to recreate the Airtable view in Softr, as you know …
What happens if you sort the block by Preprint Title A-Z? My assumption is that this will group the records together, but they will not be separated with the same visual clarity that Airtable provides. You are using a table block, right?
Hi @reily I’m sorry to hear that you faced a crucial inconvenience. I have an idea on how to make it work, but not sure if it will be convenient given your data. Let me explain to see if it works for you.
What I would personally do:
First of all I would create Airtable views by filtering the records that are grouped. Let’s say if there are 30 records with categories group 1, group 2, group 3, I would create 3 views and filter them in Airtable so that view 1 shows group 1, view 2 shows group 2 and so on.
Then I would create 3 list blocks in Softr mapping them to corresponding views, so that list 1 is mapped to view 1, list 2 to view 2 etc. As a result the groups will be distinguished in Softr.
I appreciate your ideas, but this is far from ideal. I have teams across the world working on different preprints each week, and this setup would require me to have upwards of 15 views and blocks added into my page, and setting specific requirements for which researchers are on what teams (dependent on the country they are in). It would be so much simpler if I had the option to filter and “group by” as Airtable view and their design interface offers. Is there a timeline on when such a functionality would be available?
@reily what about adding a field in your table called “grouping” which you then use in Softr by using the “sort” functionality on the list block, sorting by the group field? Is that possible?
Here to also say this is a crucial need for an app I’m building as well. In my use-case, we are grouping ancestry tasks by ‘tier’ ie parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so forth through to the 10th generation (for now). The multiple list blocks is not an ideal solution. Filtering by ‘tier’ stored on the record is a more easily implemented solution, but it is still not ideal. It would be MUCH better to have the records pre-grouped for the user.
