Forum Discussion

IvanWeiss's avatar
IvanWeiss
Qrew Captain
5 years ago

Allowing users to "Favorite" Projects

Good morning everyone,

I have a user requesting the ability to "favorite" a project so that they can have a quick list to projects they are working on vs every project they are working on.  This is a great idea for us and my first inclination was to make a "Favorite" checkbox and if that is checked create a report.  However, I quickly realized it cannot be a shared field between users.  That Favorite checkbox needs to be per user.  Lets say I am working on this same project with someone else.  I might want to favorite it, but that person might not.

How would I go about implementing that in Quick Base?

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Ivan Weiss
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App builders
  • EvanMartinez's avatar
    EvanMartinez
    Quickbase Staff
    5 years ago
    Hi Ivan,

    There isn't a perfect pre-existing feature for this type of favorites list but there are a few options. If the pool of users who would want to be tagged on a record is small you could create a user field that can be filtered against to help them find the records they have favorited when they add themselves to the list. I do this in a few of my apps for Stakeholders that want to be kept up to date on a project or ongoing process. Alternatively if your pool is bigger another option is to create a child table and create a favorite button that allows a user to favorite a record by capturing the record ID and current user and dropping it into the Favorites child table, then you summarize up the number of favorite records that include the current user and build your report off of that summary field being more than 1. This way it is dynamic for the user logged in. Then you can drop a button on the dashboard for a user to 'Manage My Favorites' and they can see everything they have favorited and delete those records that aren't relevant anymore. It gives you the advantage of letting you also manage who gets to see that favorites using permissions so users can't tinker with each others favorites You can get even more creative with Pipelines and Automations if you want to build out another level of complexity to the process.

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    Evan Martinez
    Community Marketing Manager
    Quick Base
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    • IvanWeiss's avatar
      IvanWeiss
      Qrew Captain
      5 years ago
      Evan,

      In my case I have 35-40 employees using the app.  However, obviously over time it could grow, who knows.  But at any given time we have no more than 7-8 people on any given project.  Which method would you go with in that case?  Would you go with the favorites table?  I guess I could see the benefit there as it will also be a button marking it as a favorite which seems easier than another method.

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      Ivan Weiss
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      • EvanMartinez's avatar
        EvanMartinez
        Quickbase Staff
        5 years ago
        Hi Ivan,

        If only 7-8 people might favorite any one record the user field would work out ok, it just has an upward limit if for example 50 people might want to favorite the same record. Though the favorites table long term might be a little easier to track, etc. For your use case it is mostly if you have concerns about people adding or removing other's favorites and throwing things off. Also if you wanted a smoother experience like the button to just add a favorite and then a report to manage the favorites they currently have. 
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        Evan Martinez
        Community Marketing Manager
        Quick Base
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