Help please
I am struggling to understand the warnings on using lists from Petter Amlie and others…
I am building my first app for a custom clothing store - and looking at just one bit of it for example
The site has about 100 products
Each product can be customised in around 8 out of say 50 total locations (T shirt chest, T shirt back, cap front,etc).
The locations datatable is lightweight and really only contains a small uploaded image, text field for name and a few number fields (area sizes).
Each location can have around 6 out of say 30 possible customisations (small embroidery, big embroidery, screenprint, etc). Again this datatable is fairly lightweight, containing just a couple of image fields, text for name and numbers for some price fields.
The information is not private.
So do I use lists or searches?
The piece I dont understand, is if I build a product page to display products, I understand that Bubble loads the whole product record (even if some fields are not displayed on the page). Thats fine - so presumably the list of location IDs are loaded.
Question 1 - is it just the location ID thats loaded here? Or does Bubble search and send the whole location record too even if its not needed for display. If it does the latter, and the location record has customisations, does the whole of these records get searched and sent as well.
Question 2 - so does a search for one product record turn into 49 (6 x 8 +1) searches in all cases. I presume it would if I wanted to display the grand-child customisations for a product in say a repeating group. But what about if my page just has simple grandparent product details only shown on the page?
Question 3. Presumably, if you say above that it only sends the Location (child) info if they are needed, then showing the location IDs in a simple list would be ok on a product page (but useless), but showing the primary fields (location names) would involve the lookup on that table multiple times?
Question 4. There appears to be recommendations to avoid lists with big datasets. I presume lists are slow if there are a lot of IDs in the list, not if there are a lot of things in the datatable. In other words a product with a list of 5 locations is not a big deal even if there are potentially thousands of locations and this will not slow as location table grows as the records are being directly addressed. Whereas a search looking for 5 records in a big table would slow as table grows?
So my app involves picking a product (T shirt), then a location (front chest) , then a customisation (2 colour screenprint). Not doing maths on lots of customisations, doing reverse lookups or anything complicated. I have given an idea of scale - which way do I link and do I go list or search route?
Thanks
Nigel