If I have a long body of text, can I truncate it to reduce WU units used?
Example: Like a blog, or long article. It doesn’t need to be fully shown until clicked on.
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The answer is simply NO
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The answer is, in more detail, no.
When you download the blog from the database, the entire Blog post’s contents are downloaded. Hiding part of it is purely a visual effect and doesn’t affect the data download.
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Yes, can create a satellite data type used for the search where your cards will display values, you can figure the max number of characters for each field displayed in cards on search results and save to the satellite data type only the number of characters you’d display for each field.
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Thank you boston and others that replied. I’ll go the satellite data way in the future.
For every character you manage to optimise not retrieving from the bubble db to a user you’ll save
- Sending the data to the user’s device (cost 0.000003 per character)
Perhaps when it becomes a material problem, then that’s the right time to spend your resources on it. 
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Yeah, until you’ve got thousands of users a day, the time you’ll spend setting up is worth many times more than the WU saved…
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It’s not about number of users, it’s about number of items returned per search, number of characters returned in search, and number of times the search takes place. It’s better to build it right from beginning so to avoid needing to waste time having to rebuild later.
You can spend hours (or $$$) building for problems of the future, but the reality is that most apps won’t get there. I just don’t see how one can build a valuable app on Bubble by obsessing over every WU.
Build maintainably and modular, and it becomes trivial to make these kinds of changes in future.
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It takes roughly 3-5 minutes to set up a backend database trigger event to keep a satellite data type in sync with the main data type, and takes maybe another 1-2 minutes to set up the satellite database structure.
The value can come from the money saved by obsessing over every WU…after all, every little bit matters.
the backend database trigger functionality is purpose built for modularity and maintainability.
yeah, trivial in the future until you have thousands of users a day
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Really though? A product is supposed to produce many times more value than it costs in something like WU. Putting time into improving the product returns way more benefit than into improving the WU usage.
Hi there, Can you please tell me why does improving a product brings much more value than just trying to use it more effectively?
I just mean that, for example, with an SaaS, I could sink some time into making it 10% more efficient and save $20/month, or I could put that time into building a new feature that will help earn $100/month in sales. These are both relatively tiny numbers - realistically you’d be looking at optimising to save $20/mo and improving the core product to earn $1000+/mo, but you get the point.
That math only changes when the all is already successful and has users so efficiency gains are worth more. Don’t invest time and money to solve the problems of tomorrow, when they’ll most likely never come.
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Correct. If you save money on WUs you save money on expenses and thus have a more valuable product. And correct, putting time into improving the product does return value, which is why improving the product to use the satellite data to be updated via backend database triggers rather than not doing that because developer doesn’t want to take 5 minutes to implement in the beginning.
At the end of the day, the OP wants to know how to use less WUs on showing a search result for all blogs. I provided that to him in a way that is simple and fast to implement…we are not talking about hours of development, it is minutes, and if spending 5-10 minutes today saves WUs starting tomorrow and avoids having to return in the future to spend a couple of hours to rebuild, then that 5-10 minutes is well worth it.
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