I may be wasting my time with Adalo. Suggestions?

Get Help Design
1

I’m trying to build a desktop web application (not a mobile application) that will have its own internal list of businesses as well as needing to connect to external, like google maps data or something, bookings, and user interactivity.

That’s all fine, I think, however something I just found after spending around 3 whole days (solid 12+ hours each day) building out other parts of the website is…

Adalo’s Map element can only display pins from a COLLECTION. I need to display pins based off a dynamic list which changes based on a search term. This doesn’t appear to be possible with Adalo as there is no way to dynamically update a collection based off the elements of a list. At least not to my understanding.

On top of the poor way Adalo handles responsive elements, and not being able to display multiple filters at once in a list (filters are reductive, cannot be set to be “AND”), and thereby calendars since they are special type of list, for example I can’t have a calendar show more than one type of element.

For example I created a Bookings collection with isApproved? isDenied? isComplete? isPending? toggles so that a user can request a booking and it will be in a default Pending state. Then the recipient can either approve or deny it which would change the state to isApproved or isDenied accordingly. Well, there’s no way to display a calendar that has filters showing BOTH of these states. I’d have to have one calendar with all the bookings in the isPending state and another one with the isApproved state, meaning the person trying to approve or deny the bookings would need to be looking back and forth at these calendars to understand whether or not they can accept the booking to ensure there is no overlap.

A solution to this might be to build out a block of available timeslots to be booked and chosen by the user in the calendar. This way it’s impossible for a user to request a booking that overlaps with another booking. Well, the problem with that is well, what if a user doesn’t know how long a booking will take, or the default bookings are in 1 hour increments and the user needs 5 hours. Then they have to go through and make 5 separate bookings in each timeslot which is not good.

That is very bad for the user on both ends.

I guess the time wasting is my own fault. Instead of messing around with UI design I should have first gone straight for the most complex aspects of my project to see if they would be possible in Adalo. Mind you, I’m not paying for the service. Maybe there are paid features that would help solve these problems? I could try the free trial of the custom actions thing to see if that might help…

I guess it’s back to Bubble.io unless anyone has any solutions to these problems. I do quite like Adalo’s interface and would like to continue working with it but these seem like nails in the coffin.

1 Like
2

Agree to that, but at least we use it as hi-fi prototype.

Such as customized component of existing or new ones.

It is so close but unable to finish it.

For Adalo’s engineering team, this should be a low hanging fruit to solve. :grinning:

3

Hi Naossoan,

Well, this is a big comment to digest but I will do my best to break it down and see if I can help.

First of all, I would like to state that as you are aware, no one tool is perfect and each tool has its advantages and disadvantages. Adalo is relatively new and is striving hard to be better and of course features and functions take time to develop and improve. With this in mind there may be some things it can and cannot do for you but it is a very flexible tool so let’s get into it.

Adalo’s Map element can only display pins from a COLLECTION. I need to display pins based off a dynamic list which changes based on a search term. This doesn’t appear to be possible with Adalo as there is no way to dynamically update a collection based off the elements of a list. At least not to my understanding.

I assume you want to add a search field and then the map update based on the results of that search? if this is the case then this is 100% possible. If you could give me more context around what you want to achieve I will show you how it is done.

On top of the poor way Adalo handles responsive elements, and not being able to display multiple filters at once in a list (filters are reductive, cannot be set to be “AND”), and thereby calendars since they are special type of list, for example I can’t have a calendar show more than one type of element.

In terms of responsiveness, this is something that does need improving and I am sure this is something Adalo will be working on but the option to create native apps and web apps does give you the option to provide for both mobile and web. With regards to the filters, there is an option to add multiple filters so if you offer an example of the use case scenario I will be able to show you how it is done.

With the calendar, you are correct, there is no way to show different colours for different data states but there are other ways to achieve this such as hiding the bookings from the calendar if they are not approved and then show lists to the user who needs to approve bookings and 'pending lists for the user who has made the bookings.

A solution to this might be to build out a block of available timeslots to be booked and chosen by the user in the calendar. This way it’s impossible for a user to request a booking that overlaps with another booking. Well, the problem with that is well, what if a user doesn’t know how long a booking will take, or the default bookings are in 1 hour increments and the user needs 5 hours. Then they have to go through and make 5 separate bookings in each timeslot which is not good.

Creating slots can be tricky but totally possible and different approaches can be found in the forum with great input from the many contributors and Adalo experts. One example can be found here Show availabilities

Adalo, like most no-code apps, may not be able to do EVERYTHING, but there isn’t one tool that can do everything and comparing tools can be tough because each has their own benefits. i hope you manage to find solutions to what you need and I am happy to help where I can, as are many others in the community so don’t be afraid to reach out for help. It’s probably best to reach out on each different function you need as large comments can be very time consuming for people to address.

Cheers
Craig

1 Like
4

My post may have seemed like I am very dissatisfied or negative toward Adalo which is completely opposite of how I feel. I am ecstatic that tools like this even exist.

I started studying web dev back in September for the sole purpose of trying to learn how to build these projects I have in mind, not because I want to be a developer or work for someone as a developer. Web dev is extremely difficult and even at this point I know very little of what I need to know to build what I have in mind myself from the backend. These tools like Adalo, Bubble, Webflow+Zapier or others will enable me to build my projects within weeks or months instead of a year or more, I just have to decide on which tools are going to allow me to do what I need to do.

After posting my thread I found out how to get the map to show my search input directly instead of trying to show it from a “list” item. I felt really stupid once I got that figured out :smiley: The next problem is that it seems it’s around an 80/20 chance that the page will break when I type something in the search. The page goes completely blank. Maybe there is a bug with the map element or something? I often have to refresh the page to bring the page back. Highly frustrating.

However, it would be nice if the pins on the map had hover capability. As it stands right now it will show the filtered results on the map, as well as a list on the side of the page, but there’s no way to tell which pin belongs to which item. Is there any way to customize the map further that I am not seeing?

When it comes to filters, when I mean is the following:

How it stands right now is if I add multiple filters to a list, it evaluates each one, in order. So, if I have a filter for Tags contains searchTerm, then the next filter is Name contains searchTerm, it evaluates each filter in order, independently, not in combination.

So if I type in “lawyer” in the search bar I will get the users who are tagged as a lawyer, but let’s say I don’t remember the tag of the user I’m looking for and instead remember their name. Well, I will get 0 results if I type their name in the box because it’s filtering by Tag first, which doesn’t contain their name.

As for the calendar and setting up bookings, I will check out the example you gave me to see if that will help me. Thank you.