Progress indication / Status update (or cancel) when changing (or adding new) Text Formula or Field Conditional Rule

Feature Requests
1

Hi there,

I am seeking your comments / votes. When I have a Text Formula field or Conditional Rule in, say a short text field, any changes will manifest in all existing records. Sometimes there are huge amount of records and what I see is it takes the time to update all respective records in the background. This is great.

However, when I’m in a debug mode and changing the field definition frequently in a short period of time, I think the process to change all connected records still continues, and I see glimpse of some old changes being manifested. Eventually it should all settle, but it may be hours until all data has been manifested with the latest update.

This creates gigantic confusion for me, as:

  1. The outcome is not reflected in short period of time.
  2. I see the value change, but some change to the interim situation.
  3. There is no progress indication to denote Knack is doing something, in the background, and / or whether it’s done. I can’t even cancel the progress even if I wanted to (say, I have an object containing 5000 records, I change accidentally when the background processing has completed half way. The changed value will stay until the other process updates these values to the new state, and so forth).

I would like to have some sort of progress indication (just like how we do with tasks) so we at least know that something is running in the background. This way, can we get a means to cancel the interim process so we don’t get confused what we are looking at (and potentially change the field definition even more, which adds processing effort in the background, in effect confuses the developer even more, into an endless cycle)? Reverting the changed value may be a challenge, but I am more for the process indication as the value will be manifested eventually anyways.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

Jin

2

I’m not able to comment form a technical or infrastructure perspective. Also, I’m not sure this would be possible given the variables.

For example, how much load there is on the server your application is on, and how many related tables have fields that are using “lookups”. :man_shrugging:

I use a multichoice field as a way to “force” the update on a table so I can ensure any “lookups” are updated whilst I’m working on it.

Add a multichoice field called “UPDATE” and simply leave the options as “First Choice”, “Second Choice” and “Third Choice” and run an update on the table changing it to one of the options. For example, update all records to “Second Choice”.

This will force a record refresh on the table once complete. I appreciate that if you have thousands of lines this will still take some time. :man_shrugging:

I run the update and then work on another part of the app and come back to it. You will have the progress indicator for the records being updated and when it finishes the table refreshes all values. You can also cancel the update if you change a value. :+1:
This way you don’t have to wait for it to happen in the background :blush:

I think your proposal is sound, but I have concerns about how difficult it would be to implement. Therefore how high up the list this would be for resource to be allocated to resolve.