How to create flat text from a parent and children records

[Leo]

I would like to generate flat text from a parent and children records for sharing post.

Collections:
I have 2 collections - parent and child. Relationship is defined as follows.

Requirement
On a screen of Family View I can show parent Ymir and her 3 children.
What I would like to do is extract flat text on some event. (pressing button or on visiting screen…)

Output text should be flatten like:
Parent
First Child
Second Child
Third Child

*In my use case, the number of children is always five.(Strict family planning is enforced )
I can collect and concatenate properties of parent using magic text but cannot collect multiple children’s properties. I was wondering if I can magic text in the list of children and copy values to a field on parent screen or something…

Does anyone could help me out?

Cloneable Sample:

test to share

[anon78309838]

Unfortunately the action to “change input field” only allows to be updated by a single property. For example. I made it so that the input field gets updated to the parents name.

[Leo]

Thanks Colin,
But even though this can represent one parent and child, we can’t put whole family into text.
Is there any way to get this information in text without using the Change Input Field?

[anon78309838]

What do you mean by putting the whole family in to text? Isn’t that what the list is doing here?

[Leo]

Hi @anon78309838,

What I would like to do is create flat text including parent/children’s name and share it on SNS.
To be more specific, I want to tweet on Twitter with the following content:
Ymir
— Sins
— Rose
— Maria
In order to do this I thought I have to generate flat text from Parent/Child collections.
I hope this make things clear.

[anon78309838]

Right, I understand better now.

Unfortunately the children are an “array” which we currently wouldn’t support in custom actions (it would only send the first one in the array). But soon our Internal Adalo API will be available which will solve that problem.

[Leo]

Thanks @anon78309838,
Now I understood. I will be waiting until the internal Adalo API is available…

[parasocks]

I read a comment in the forums saying that using AirTable as a backend for Adalo apps was bad for this reason (only being able to use the first entry in an array)

Here’s the comment (from here: When is Adalo's DB not enough? - #2 by TysonUnruh)

“That said, I’m using Adalo’s database because of some limitations such as external databases’ relationships will only return the first string in an array (ie. if there are several related items in a field, eg. multiple products in a product category, Adalo will only return the first product).”

That’s the main reason I chose not to use AirTable - even though I pay for it and had a whole database pre-built for my app there… So does this mean that Adalo’s internal datastore has the same limitations as AirTable? Is there any reason not to use AirTable?

Like literally the way I add data to Adalo right now is I have an AirTable setup that is an exact copy of my Adalo table, and I do my data entry there, export as CSV, import, then delete at AirTable… Because it’s still much better than adding records one at a time.