Can I use MIRROR for grids?

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Kenneth Bryan Piamonte

• March 07, 2018 01:08
• Edited

Hi Guys,

I am currently designing a form and wondering if I can use the backdoor feature 'MIRROR' in a grid.

Basically, this is the scenario:

GRID A - will be filled out by the initial user

data 1
data 2
data 3

---------------------------------------------

GRID B - will be filled out by the 2nd user (he can add remarks or other info), the previous info from GRID A should be on GRID B but as 'ready only' (more like a summary of GRID A).
 
data 1 (read only) | remarks 1 (editable by user 2)
data 2 (read only) | remarks 2 (editable by user 2)
data 3 (read only) | remarks 3 (editable by user 2)

I tried to use MIRROR on GRID B, but it's not working. I'm wondering if I'm not doing it properly.

Thank you!

-Ken

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• 

  Sara Kaplow, Community Manager

  • March 08, 2018 17:34

  Hi Kenneth,

  That's some advanced app building you're doing! There are some definite limitations with mirroring, especially when it comes to grids/loops, so the short answer to your question is no, it's not going to work from one loop to another. The sort of high-level reason is that when you're in a loop, the field that's supposed to populate with the mirrored data isn't going to know which of the values to pull over (so if there are 10 entries in a loop, is it supposed to mirror entry 1 or entry 10?). You'd also get tripped up if you're doing this across workflows. 

  There are a couple of ways you could get to the same result, though. 

  First would be to, instead of using Workflow to pass to a different user, use Zapier to Dispatch to a second App. You can create a Dispatch from there that pulls over your first set of data and puts it into the second App. Check out the comment here: https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000466967-Grouping-forms. Then the second App could also have the comment field.

  The other way would be to still use Workflow, but on the Workflow setup page, use the options to allow users to edit previous data AND start from the beginning of the App. So they'd see the data and then be able to leave a comment. You would probably also want to do a conditional screen here, either on the first user's turn to get to the screen that triggers the Workflow or on the second user's turn to be able to avoid that screen (otherwise you'd be stuck in a crazy Workflow loop forever). You could also do a conditional field that triggers the comment fields to be exposed, so that you could hide them from the first user. That's getting a little fancy :)

  It's entirely possible that there are other ways of doing this though. I'd be super interested to hear if anyone else has run into this and what they've done. 

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  Kenneth Bryan Piamonte

  • March 11, 2018 23:50

  Hi Sara,

  Oh my! You're so amazing, thank you so much for these suggestions. I'm currently leaning to your 2nd suggestion, I hope this will get the job done. If not, then I'll follow your tip and check out Zapier.

  I'll post another question here in the community section if ever I get any issues.

  Thanks again!

  -Ken

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