Hi @sizzily86 
I had a really hard time getting the hang of this, but it definitely gets easier!
I would definitely create two data types for color and fruit (as you did), and set them up in this way:
Fruit Data Type:
Here there are two fields:
- Color (type: Color, list: no) stores the Color piece of data (or Thing) connected to this fruit.
- Name (type: text, list: no) stores the name of the Fruit
Color Data Type:
- Name (type: text, list: no) stores the name of the Color
Then in the app, you can set up workflows which create a new Color Thing:
In this workflow, the User would enter a color name into the input and click save to create a new Color Thing:
The workflow to create the new Color thing saves the text value ‘Red’ to the ‘Name’ field of the Color:
And in the app data it looks like this:
Then we want to associate the red Color Thing (or table row) with different fruits in the app. To do this, we can use a dropdown which does a Search for all of the Colors in our database, and displays the Name field of each Color (so the choices would look like Red, Green, Blue, Purple - if we created those Colors).
Here the User can first enter the name of a Fruit (such as Strawberry), and the dropdown will search for all of the Colors in the database. Since we only created one Color Thing so far (for Red), it will only allow us to pick Red from the dropdown:
The workflow to save the new red strawberry Fruit Thing is:
Here the text input where we typed ‘Strawberry’ is stored to the Name field, and the Color dropdown where we chose the red Color Thing is saved to this new Fruit’s Color field. In app data it will first look like this:
This looks confusing at first glance because we might feel like the Color column for the strawberry should just say ‘Red’ instead of that very long number. That long number is the red Color Thing’s unique id. Every ‘Thing’ we create is automatically given a unique ID, and that ID links the Red Color Thing we created, to the Strawberry Fruit Thing we created.
We can tell Bubble to display the Color’s Name field, instead of the unique ID field by going to Primary Fields → Color → Name:
After clicking save, the fruit app data will now show the name of the Color, instead of its unique id (proving that we linked the color to the fruit):
Last but not least! We can query the data in a repeating group in two ways:
One way would be to Do a Search for Fruits:
The text elements within the cell display the Current cell’s Fruit’s Name, as well as the Current cell’s Fruit’s Color’s Name:
The dynamic data is:
And in preview mode, for Strawberry it looks like:
The second method would be to have a repeating group which does a search for Colors:
Similar to the other repeating group setup, the cell is displaying the Current cell’s Color’s Name. To find the fruits associated with each Color, we can place a text element which Does a Search for Fruits, whose Color = Current cell’s Color:
And in preview mode with the Color Red, and strawberry, it will look like this:
Then if we wanted to add another fruit ‘Apple’ through the create a new Fruit form, the differences in searches would look like this:
So, those are different setups but similar results! Here a link to the example app if you’d like to view the workflows or add a few more colors and fruits in preview mode:
Preview:
Editor:
I hope this wasn’t too overwhelming - If anything was confusing, please feel free to let me know and I’ll definitely try to explain more clearly!