Dynamically Reference Elements in Workflows

austin3 · 2020-09-15T15:17:03.266Z

Morning Bubblers,

I’m developing an app that has a number of “views” that can be shown/hidden. I’d like these views to be shown/hidden via animation to make transitions seem nice. I’ve actually created an Option set with an option for each of these views, which is how I generally control which view is visible. I’ve been using the “animate an element” workflow action when showing views to make it look pretty. However, I’m running into trouble when it comes to going back to the previous view.

I’ve got a clever trick working with javascript to fire a generic callback event which will adjust the current visible view by popping the current option off the end of a list (for coding-savvy folks, its basically just a stack of views). However, I would like to animate a view being hidden in a similar way to how I animate a view being shown. The problem is that the callback event is generic, while the animate action takes a specific element.

Thus lies the problem: While I can easily track which view is being hidden via the option set, I have no way of tying it to its specific UI element. The current solution I’d need to do is similar to how I animate the showing of views: Create a separate animate action for each element. This would basically end up with a long workflow of “if view is X -> hide X, if view is Y -> hide Y, if view is Z -> hide Z” which is a pain to maintain.

Thus my feature request: Provide a way to reference UI elements dynamically. An easy candidate for this could be the “id” field that you can expose, and have a data source that is “retrieve element by id” that would be accessible any time you could choose an element. This could also be done in a number of other ways.

Thanks!

eLPDev · 2021-04-27T13:09:46.170Z

Definitely see the value for this feature. Would make for far fewer workflows if you could create a single workflow with customized actions based on the element used.