Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

Mike Schmitt — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:51:51 GMT

One way I've seen it done (which of course depends on context as well as how often the text in question will really be up around 4,000 characters) is to have the link *completely hide* the grid (as well as the rest of the form and its buttons) and *just* show the expanded text, and from there the user's only option is to click "back" to restore the original form/grid/etc. This option, though slightly harder to design, sidesteps the issue of creating an overstuffed grid column, or the alternative option of forcing the user to scroll down to the end of the grid to view the expanded text.

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

davel001150 — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 14:05:27 GMT

Ellipsis is a great option, one the project I'm on uses routinely, but I think you should really check out a Lorem Ipsum generator website, and get 4000 characters of Lorem Ipsum to put in the column to see how it looks. If the column is too narrow, it's going to be really ugly and require scrolling. A single row could easily take up more than the whole screen, eliminating the whole effect if it even being a grid, so you need to take that into consideration.

If there's no other way to have the text readable, you might want to consider some other progressive disclosure options like some other component outside the grid itself. It all depends on how readable you can get it within the grid. If you need to throw it away (keeping it immediately in the grid), don't be afraid to throw it away.

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

Malleswari Talakola — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:57:07 GMT

Thanks a lot for the response, Arthur!

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

Malleswari Talakola — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:56:23 GMT

Thnaks alot stewart, i will try the design and check with users!

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

Stewart Burchell — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 07:43:28 GMT

There are a variety of techniques, depending on the size of the text and the real-estate of the User interface:

you can display a subset of the text e.g. first 20 characters, with an ellipsis e.g. "This is the text to be displayed but there's more to see (...)", and make the ellipsis a dynamic link that will reveal the whole text when you click on it, but still in the same column
you could make the dynamic link show the full text in a separate component below the table where it probably will look better but you lose the immediacy/context of it in the row in the table

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

Arthur Lyrio — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 09:56:27 GMT

Here we put a "Read more" link at the top of the grid. When the user clicks it, it shows the full text for all the rows and columns.
When the text is not expanded, we just trim it at a maximum size and put the "..." at the end.

This can be done using only one variable local!isGridExpanded and whenever the variable changes (by clicking the link), the function that trims the text will be refreshed by Appian itself showing or hiding the whole text.

Hope it helps.

RE: Best approach to display 4000 characters in a!GridField

SANTOSH S KUNDLIK — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 18:41:47 GMT

I don't think there could be a best approach but if its must and Grid doesnt have performance issue (limited rows) then you can divide the comment into 100-200 character length string and combine all those with char (10) to see then on new line. Keep the column width wider as possible.