Hi everyone
Just had a six week break from PApps, That's not a good thing.
I have a form with 52 fields sourcing from Sharepoint. I have configured the form so that buttons in a gallery change which fields are visible. So What I'm wondering is how many fields is too many, or and what's the best way to handle a form with so many fields. What I am making is a incident report/investigation form.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you for your quick reply, currently about 50 columns in one table, it is going to balloon out to 80. I am happy to add another table for the remaining columns. I'll try not to bore you with the detail, but it's a form that initially logs incidents at work, then later an investigation is conducted. So to recap currently I have a table for people and a table for the Incident. So it sounds like a separate table and form would be wise for the Investigation of the Incident.
80 columns in one table, or 80 columns across multiple tables?
I wouldn't be so concerned about stability as I would about large amounts of data being transferred and cumbersome queries if everything is in one big table. Oh, and maintainability in the future too. I wrote a little blog article on the topic that you may find useful. Don't get me wrong, sometimes a solution needs a lot of columns, but make sure that isn't happening for app maker convenience rather than true solution need.
Bryan
Hi Bryan
You raise some very valid points and I will take your advise, but may I extend the question a bit. It is looking like the finished article will be connected to 80 columns in Sharepoint. Will my app still be stable?
If you are using buttons to control card visibility, try validating your data on the DisplayMode property of those buttons. The user experience suffers if they get all the way to the final fields, only to find out they have to go back and fix something done early on. As well, if you are concerned about data loss while working the way through the form, consider submitting partway through and accessing the partially-completed record through Form.LastSubmit. It would be frustrating to lose data entered because there was a connection glitch.
Hope that helps,
Bryan