Another piece of functionality we have released today is an ability to move columns between tables. What is it for?
You often start with simple application design. Then you recognize that needs grow and requirements are changing. Take our favorite example, Leads Management application – the city is a type-in field. Good for a start, but it is often a source of typing errors and it would be nice to have it as a dropdown list. Simplest way is to switch City column’s Data Entry property from a Type-In to dropdown, but, in this case, only application administrators will be able to maintain the list. And if you want users to be able to edit entries you need to have it in a separate table.
Before today’s release you could do it by exporting the data to Excel, building the list of unique entries, importing the data back to a separate table, changing table’s key to a city name, creating the relation, then changing the key back – a lot of non-trivial steps. From now you can do it with a few clicks.
When viewing column’s properties you may notice new Move button. Clicking the button will prompt you what to do.
You can either move the column to a new table, or to one of the master tables (the list of options is built based on relationship between tables you already have). Let’s start with a new table:
TeamDesk will build distinct list of cities for you, create the new table based on the list and will bind existing leads to a cities table through the relationship. The city name become a lookup field.
You may want to go one step further – the state can be used together with the city name in the dropdown thus you can move state column to a city table as well. Since TeamDesk created the relationship between Leads and Cities you have one more choice now:
After confirming the changes and setting up Cities’ record picker view to display both the city name and state you’ll end up with the following user interface:
As you can see, the process that required a lot of operations and external programs is now replaced with a one-click tool.
