Make List & List of Lists - confusion

Hi guys

Can someone help me with the concept behind ‘Make List’ & ‘List of Lists’?
I’ve read the Adalo help docs, but I’m not able to understand the concept I suppose.

I understood the pedagogical part - as in the example in help docs for a trip, each item has a sub-item which in itself is a list.

But If I needed to combine elements of different tables (whether tables have a relationship across them or not), should I combine them together by ‘Make List’ and therefore I made it a ‘List of Lists’?

An example of a use case - when I would need to use either - will be help.

EG - My current use case - I’m trying to manage my schedule. I could have group meetings, webinars or 1-1s. If all three are different tables, should I combine them to form a single list / collection called ‘Schedule’ if I wanted to display my entire day’s calendar ? If yes, how should I go about doing it?

I know I could just have a ‘meeting category’ property type in above example, but I’m trying to understand whether Lists of Lists could scale horizontal (across tables) rather than vertical (list of items within a table which is a list of items for another table entry).

Hi @tjd_15,

A list can only contain one data type at a time, so lists of lists are only useful for verticals as you’ve described them.

The most efficient way for you to attack your use case, in my opinion, would be to have a collection type of ‘appointment’ and a collection type of ‘calendar’. I would also, as Adalo doesn’t natively support calendars yet, create a collection of ‘days’, one for each day of the year going forward for the next x years.

Create your calendar, and then create your appointments. Link each appointment to your calendar and to a calendar day. Have an ‘appointment type’ field, in which you tell the system if it’s a group meeting, webinar or 1-1.

To show your schedule, show a list of days. In each day, show a list of appointments, filtered to be in your calendar. Sort in order of start time.

There is no obvious benefit (and, indeed, plenty of drawbacks) to having them as three separate tables.

You could, if you wished, have a ‘calendar’ collection, and create a different collection type for each of your types of appointment, and then to show your schedule, show the list of days and in each day put three lists (one for each type), but you won’t be able to get them (readily) to show in the right order, because it’ll show all the group meetings together, all the 1-1’s together and all the webinars together.

I can’t think of any benefits to the ‘horizontal’ approach, in honesty. What was your angle on those?

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Hi @dosandco

Thanks for the detailed reply. Really appreciate you going in depth.

I understand your explanation and know it doesn’t really work for my example.

Really my primary intention was to understand List of Lists correctly as a concept, and figure out what use cases are / aren’t possible with them. I suppose it is a little bit of a mistake at my end because I gave a wrong example / use-case in the forum.

In any case, your example and explanation clarifies everything, so thanks again.

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