Views

In Dabble DB, each of your Applications is made up of Entries that belong to one or more Categories. Views are the basic workspace of Dabble. You can create different views to focus your attention on a particular set of data at once. To edit your data, click one of the entries in the view to open the entry editor.

At its simplest, a view might show you entries in one category. This limit on the view — showing only one category — is called a filter. You can add and remove filters at will to widen or narrow your view to just the entries you want to work with. (If you want to show all entries in the entire application in one view, you can remove all the filters.)

Depending on what type of view you’re using (see the different types below), you can also change what Fields from each entry are included in the view and you can sort them, group them and add Formulas, subtotals and more.

Views are “non-destructive”. What that means is that changing what you see in the view has no effect on the data itself. Views allow you to organize the same data in multiple ways, all while keeping the data structure itself intact.

Because of this, Dabble is designed to let you create new views quickly and easily. You can play around with each view and when you have something that you want to keep, you can save it so that you and other users can access it later.

You can also share, export or print views using the buttons on the view header.

Views are communal. That is, each view that is saved inside an application is accessible to all users who can see the application. Users with write access can save changes to any view unless it’s locked.

Once you have saved a view, you can continue to make changes to it. Dabble will remember those changes unless you revert to the saved version.

No matter what you change on a view, everyone will see the data in its current form. Note, however, that unsaved changes to the view (different columns, sorting and grouping, etc.) will only be remembered for you. Other users will see the view configured as it was when last saved.

When there are unsaved changes to a view, certain export options will be unavailable until you save the view again or revert it back to the saved version.

You can also specify a Home view to show when you first open an application, and define a default view to use for each category.

There are several different types of views in Dabble:

• Table view is the default type shown whenever you create a new view. This is similar to a traditional spreadsheet with rows and columns of data.

• Compact view shows a summary of a set of data. It focuses on grouped entries.

• Chart view shows comparisons of data visually. You can create bar charts and line charts.

• Map view shows numeric data broken down by geographical area by using Location values.

• Calendar view shows data in a traditional calendar form by month, week or day.

You can also export views to use a set of data outside of Dabble.

The different views can be selected using the tabs in the upper-right corner of the view. Disabled tabs indicate views which are currently unavailable because they do not apply to the current data.