Ignore 'Empty' Dynamic Dropdown When Making Changes to a Thing

Hi everyone,

I’m new to Bubble (love it :grinning:) but I’m unable to find how to ignore an ‘empty’ dynamic dropdown when making changes to a thing.

Here’s the scenario:

I have a submission form…On that form I have several input fields including a dynamic dropdown to select one of several location names.

Upon submission of the form I create a new thing in the database (so far so good).

Now, if the user wants to make changes to that thing, I send them back to the same form where they can view/edit all the input fields and update the information (workflow makes changes to the thing, all good).

The Problem
The issue I’m running into is…when the user returns to the form and updates everything but the location name, the stored location name is deleted from the database upon submission because Bubble sees the location dropdown as ‘empty’ when returning to the form (though I am passing placeholder text from the parent data type field which doesn’t seem to be an actual ‘value’).

Here’s my question:
How can I ignore the ‘location’ dropdown if it is ‘empty’ when the user returns to edit the form and submit changes? Is there a better solution out there?

Here is how my dropdown is configured:
image

Everyone on this forum rocks by the way!!!

-Mike

Hey Mike,

Welcome to Bubble!

This is happening because you are storing the location as a text field on your Asset thing and not as a link to the Facility thing. The dropdown is looking for a Facility value, not a text value, which is why it wouldn’t let you put the Parent group’s Asset’s Asset Location Name in the default value.

You can fix this by changing your data structure to store the actual Facility record on your Asset or by changing the Type of choice on your dropdown to Text if you want to store the text only.

To do this, make the following changes to your dropdown properties:

  • Type of choices change to Text

  • Choices source will be Search for Facility’s Name

  • Since we are displaying text, Option caption will now simply be Current option

  • In Default value add Parent group’s Asset’s Asset Location Name

You will have to make an adjustment to the make changes to thing workflow so that it simply saves the value of the dropdown but that should solve your problem.

Cheers :beers:

@eli - That worked and totally makes sense now. Can’t thank you enough and great lesson going forward!!!

1 Like

Happy to help! I wasted a lot of time trying to make similar scenarios work when I first got started so you are not alone :smiley:

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