I’m pretty new to Knack (three days as of today), but I have various objects which I have enabled “add a new option” on. When I, or a user, clicks on the “add a new option” I see a modal popup allowing me to populate SOME of the fields of that object. I don’t seem to have any ability to control which fields are displayed on this modal for an object, nor do I seem to have any ability to control what fields are labeled. It’s bizarre.
I would expect these “child” pages to show up below their “parent” pages (as others do), but I don’t see them. Is this because I’m on the trial plan? Is there somewhere else to find them? Or some setting I’m missing? Because it’s really hamstringing me to be unable to edit and modify the child pages which display as a result of clicking on “add a new option.”
Hi @Abey - welcome to Knack .
If you’ve not found the knowledgeable article the below may help further.
I’m not sure if you are getting confused between adding a new record rather than a new option.
The “add new option” simply gives you the ability, from the live app, to add additional items to either a Multichoice field or a connected object. In certain cases this can be helpful. However, a word of caution, as you can end up with the same or very similar items being added by different users on a multichoice field. If you are using a connected object you can make the field unique so this avoids the exact same option being added twice. However, as we are all dealing with humans, it’s still possible to have “banana”, “bannana” or “bananna” in the same list as these are all unique but spelt differently.
Controlling options in a drop down can be very important if you want to aggregate the data for reporting or do searches on the data at a later date.
The above “banana” example would require three or more queries to find all the results.
I’ve also provided I video about using multichoice verses connected objects. You may find it helpful.
The popup doesn’t form part of the schema so doesn’t sit below the parent form. It’s simply a form for that one field so a user can add an additional option.
Thanks for the rapid response, Carl. And excellent work on the video. I watched it all the way through and got some good ideas for other things I’ll want to do.
I think, for this issue, I must not be being adequately clear. Here’s some screenshots of what is driving me up a wall:
When I click on “add a new option” this modal pops up, and it just has the field names (and not even necessarily the fields I want). I look for some way to edit/modify this modal in the pages menu…and it’s not there…
So…basically I don’t know how to control the modals that pop-up in the app when I click on “add a new option” when using the front-end. Thoughts? It seems like a huge oversight if there’s no way to edit these modals…
Oh, and I should specify that the “Add stallion” in the last screenshot is the PARENT page, not the child modal which is trigged by clicking on “Add a new option”
Oh and the second thing I should mention is that this particular case is self-referential. So I want to allow the user to input a “sire” of a stallion, which (of course) refers to another instance of the stallion record. I.e., one stallion’s sire is himself a stallion. I don’t think that matters for my issue, because I see the same issue with other “add new option” scenarios. Basically, for any modal tied to “add a new option” I can’t control anything that is visible on that modal to the end-user.
OMG. I just figured out how to do what I wanted to. Now that I know about it it seems super obvious, but it’s really not great UX and it’s also not covered ANYWHERE in the docs as far as I can tell.
As you say, obvious when you know how. Not sure I’d have thought of mentioning the orange link icon to you, however, when building I would have automatically clicked on it without thinking
I’ll raise this issue of documenting to the product manager and see if it can be added to the existing knowledge base article.
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