Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

RE: Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

deepk0001 — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:45:41 GMT

I would say this grid layout is very common in lot of entreprise applications and its out of the box in so may other frameworks . appian should take a feedback on all these things and try to do atleast 50% of what react or angular can do in the UI space.

RE: Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 16:56:04 GMT

There really isn't anything that will closely approximate grouped grid columns in the sense you're looking for (remember that Appian is not intended to be an Excel clone, etc). But also at your disposal you have sections, box layouts, card layouts, buttons, etc. You could, for example, use several side-by-side cards at the top of your interface to approximate "tabs", which upon clicking, could cause your base grid to show a separate subset of columns. You could also use nested and/or stacked sections to do other fun things that might help you achieve your end goal.

What is the requirement? The user says they "want grid fields to be grouped". Part of your job (just generalizing here) is to translate that into the actual requirement. The questions you ask yourself will be something like the following:

1. "what functionality does that allow them to accomplish?"
2. "what available functionality might allow us to also accomplish that?"

RE: Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

thevarunbawa — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 16:50:56 GMT

Mike Schmitt I totally agree with you. Can you suggest any achievable approach in Appian similar to this. User really wants the grid fields to be grouped.

I am really bad with designing UIs, LOL. We are open to any new ideas. Thanks

RE: Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

Mike Schmitt — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 16:39:42 GMT

This is a bit of a "square peg into a round hole" problem.

I repeat this here often, but it's always worth reiterating: Proper "requirements" don't dictate design.

However, here you're starting out with a design that (presumably) works somewhere else, and trying to hammer that design into Appian (even though it doesn't truly fit). Instead, you need to consider the capabilities Appian already provides, and figure out a way to satisfy the actual requirements using the available functionality.

RE: Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

thevarunbawa — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 16:36:02 GMT

Chris

Above is the table I am trying to create in Appian. Can we do something similar with proper alignment at least for desktop screen wide/fit/narrow?

RE: Merged and nested Grids columns in paging grid

Chris — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 15:25:17 GMT

AFAIK there isn't really any smooth way to create a setup guaranteed to be as detailed as you show there, due to the dynamic widths, different devices, etc. Other than attempting to use something like the card/column combo from the referenced thread. You cannot layer headers in a paging grid, so you would have to include that under the card layouts, which you cannot match column sizes to the cards above, unfortunately.

In theory you could get this as an output from Appian into Excel, but you would have to use the deprecated Export CDT to Excel service, for which we don't have an OOTB replacement that handles excel templates as smoothly.

I would be interested to know the use case, this is something where you may have to work with the users to adjust to something we can create more reliably and supportable, within Appian.