Copy a Thing - Feature Request

[J805]

Bubble,

I really like this copy a list functionality, it actually has saved me so much time. I have no idea why I didn’t realize this was there before. Anyways, can you add a “Copy a Thing” feature too? Seems like there are work arounds but it would be nice to just click on the button for the beginners or even just making things easier for all of us. Think this would be very helpful. All your work is much appreciated! Each new feature is exciting and makes me eager to implement them. Thanks bubble!

[romanmg]

Yeah, would be nice, but if it helps (you or anyone else), you can do “single thing :converted to list” pretty quickly in the copy list action.

[J805]

Ya, thanks. That’s what I’m doing now. I just think it would be a nice thing to have if Bubble did that little conversion for us, especially to make things less confusing for new ones. I am just trying to send suggestions up instead of always just doing work arounds to help improve bubble for everyone.

Thanks @romanmg you always have super helpful posts here on the Forum.

[romanmg]

Fair, fair Thanks for looking out for the newbies!

[keith]

@romanmg is correct, of course. More generally ANY list operation can be applied to a single thing because you can always turn a single item into a one-item list with the :make list operator.

This isn’t a hack or workaround — this is how Bubble is designed to work. And it’s documented.

To have redundant single-item actions for existing listwise actions does not seem desirable to me. It would just add clutter.

The part that isn’t documented is sort of the “why?” of listwise operations. List operators are where we find looping and iteration features of Bubble.

We often see people ask about doing something iteratively. Sometimes, the iteration is not available in vanilla Bubble. But with respect to things and the database, most of the iterative operations you’d need to perform are actually already available.

The trick is, in array-oriented systems, you have to think about iteration differently than in other languages/systems. Iteration starts with having an existing array, upon which the iterative action can be done.

(For a practical example of this in Bubble, have a look at what I suggested to @zelus_pudding here: How to create a Thing, multiple times?)

As an array-oriented system, Bubble is currently slightly incomplete. Most noteably it’s missing a facility to create and auto-populate lists of native data type with arbitrary lengths.

(Like create a create a list of numbers 0 to 99, incremented by 1. Or, create a list of dates today to tomorrow, incremented by 30 minutes.)

In systems that offer array operations instead of loops — which is what Bubble does — such features are kind of essential. There are workarounds for this, but they are either manual (make these things manually in your database) or involve using Toolbox.

[J805]

Thanks for posting your view on the matter. I am sure Bubble likes to get a well rounded view of the users of bubble before implementing any new features.

I guess I am just speaking as someone who does not know any other programming language. I am just learning directly from bubble without much prior knowledge. Just trying to make suggestions for ideas for some new users that may be like myself.

Of course @keith, we appreciate your view as well. Thanks for sharing!