Create a record as a copy of the selected one by default

gary

Hello,
I'm new here, so first things first: congratulations for this impressive platform!

I've been exploring more and more recently, and I'm struggling with this use case:

I have a form with a list, pointing to a relation of about 10 fields. I would love to be able to select a row in the list, and press a button like "Save as" to open an input form with a new record with most fields pre-populated by the values of the selected row. That would allow me to input a new key field (a new date), and change a value or two, but not have to re-enter every field before saving.
Alternatively, rather than select the row and press a button from the list form, I could open that row into an input form, and press a "Save as" button from there.
Would it help if I was to make a baby app and share it?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help,

Gary

gabriel

gary
Hello Gary and welcome to the forum :)

What you describe is possible, by opening the to-be-duplicated record in a form and then using frontend functions.

We have implemented this in our Password Safe application. You can look at the entry form to see how it works. The relevant form action is called Duplicate.

How it works in short:

The duplicate form action executes a frontend functions that copies all relevant field values of the current record to the value store (see instance function placeholders). It then loads a new record.
When the form loads the new record, a second frontend function is triggered, checking if there is anything in the value store. If so, it applies all values to the currently empty input fields for the new record. It then clears the value store.
The user can now directly save or make changes before.

You can do all this also within the context of the list field by using an inline form and hiding all the inputs. The logic would work the same, you would just show a single button ("Save as") and maybe an input field for the new name.

gary

thanks, that looks very promising, and I do get how the code in the password safe app works, it's a good example.
By the way, the function 'duplicate' ends with app.form_open('098ec706-3084-4515-8b2c-2a8583a70ea7', 0, false, false); rather than with opening with the name of the 'entry' form. Any particular reason?

To go further, I was wondering if it's possible to make it a generic function that could be called centrally, as I'd like to use that concept on many of my forms.
Something along the lines of:

central function 'duplicate_current_form':
- declare or empty a 'duplicates' store.
- for each field in the calling form, store its name and value in the 'duplicates' store.
- then open a new instance of the calling form

central function 'input_from_duplicates': call it on form function after/open
if the store 'duplicates' is not empty, for each 'name'/'value' pair in store, fill the 'name' field with 'value' on the current form

Unfortunately I know nothing about javascript (yet), but do you see a reason why it could not be generalised like that?

thanks a lot in advance,

Gary

gabriel

gary

The function app.form_open() uses the form ID (instead of a form name) because for some entities (like forms or presets) we currently do not have placeholders. Its not super convenient, but workable for now.

You can generally centralize functions - that often makes sense. In the case of record duplication however, this will not work. Reason being, that every form has different fields and even if you would always copy all field values, functions have scopes. A global function for example cannot access fields on a particular form. While a form assigned function can only access fields from the corresponding form.

You could still use a global function for some generic task (like working with the value store) - for the value retrieval and creation of a new record, you will need specific form-assigned functions.

A way back, we considered a generic record duplication action on a form level, which would just copy/paste all values - but we found that in most cases this was not sufficient because there were always edge cases. We might revisit the topic in the future, but functions provide full flexibility in the meantime, to implement record duplication however desired.

gary

I see, ok, thanks a lot for the quick answer!