What is best approach for Parent Updates in UI when making Child Add/Edit/Deletes?

[WillowMobileSys]

This post is a bit long but is an important topic probably for all of us, if not now then in the future.

Several threads have discussed it but with no real conclusion on best approach. The reason, I have discovered, is that there are trade-offs depending on developer needs. The intent here is to gather all the info and issues with these particularly common use cases and discuss different workaround approaches until enhancements can be made to improve on these needs. This way we all can benefit and hopefully newcomers will find this in the future to help them.

When we want to see changes to Parent values in the UI after editing the Children there are 6 main use cases to consider

A) 3 for Add/Edit/Delete of the Children when in Edit mode of the Parent.
B) 3 for Add/Edit/Delete of a Child row directly - e.g. selecting child from Parent Detail view.

Consider Add and Edits Only for a Moment

When making Child changes in situation A), to see changes to the Parent immediately, summary functions need to be implemented in the Parent columns. Saving a child change triggers the recalculation of the summary functions upon return to the Parent Edit form.

When making Child changes in situation B), the UI flow never takes you to the Parent Form so summary functions will not trigger and the Parent summary fields will be out of sync. This can be corrected by implementing an Event Action on the Child Form Save. The action computes the summary fields.

Problem 1 - You cannot have both a summary function in the App Formula of the Parent field AND an Action that computes the same Parent field value. When in situation A), changing a Child from Parent Edit mode, an Event Action on the Child Form Save does not fire, it is ignored.

So, if we need to see Edit/Add changes in the UI, developers cannot support both situation A) and B) described above. You have to choose one or the other.

Now add Deletes to the Picture

In situation A) above, the UI currently does NOT have a Delete capability. When editing the Parent, no Inline or Overlay Actions are shown for the Children.

So if you need to support Delete you are kind of forced into situation B), support Direct Edit of Children and would likely want to include an Event Action. This means when editing Children from Parent Edit mode, you will not see the impact of the Child change to the parent in the UI.

Best Approach?

There are a number of workarounds I can think of but none give a great UX experience. So, keeping in mind that the goal is to support all 6 of the use cases described above, let’s discuss as a community ideas for workaround solutions…until AppSheet can provide an enhancement that eliminates the need to make these trade-offs.