Important updates about the beta expression composer

Like many on this post I too find myself using the beta only when I need to change something mid expression without loosing the rest of the expression in the standard expression and then toggle back to the old when I’m done. I think you should keep the beta just for that reason and we’d all know that it’s not perfect. Make the pop up that says report bugs to say this is just a beta and doesn’t work please don’t write to us as we’re not supporting this beta any more. Or something to that effect. Without this it take a lot of time to re-write a long expression with nested conditions.

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I’ve only been using Bubble since January and think I’ve only ever used the beta expression builder. Anything I should worry about here, or will I transition back easily?

Will try some stuff tonight (after my day job :slight_smile: )

How do you do that? For the life of me, I can’t figure out how to change the order. I feel like I’m missing something simple, but can’t figure it out. Did I miss it in the manual?

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Hmmm, maybe I just don’t know how to use them correctly. I tried a couple times and it always put parentheses wherever it wanted.

Thanks all for the understanding so far. I appreciate all the additional feedback in this thread! To chime in on a few topics…

These two comments are related! We do totally get the benefit of parentheses in expressions - one of the early things users are forced to learn is that expressions are evaluated left-to-right (mostly) and not based on PEMDAS. The older experimental feature reveals the ‘implicit’ parentheses in how Bubble parses expressions, but to Eli’s point, you can’t place them yourself, which is also surprising to users.

To clarify: with the older parentheses experimental feature, you sort of can in some cases (not directly, but through what’s basically a workaround), but you don’t have full freedom to place parentheses wherever you want. Similarly, the older parentheses experimental feature allowed inserting a chunk in the middle of an expression in some cases but not as many as the beta expression composer.

Funny you call those two out… :speak_no_evil:

There isn’t a single, big project targeting editor performance on our roadmap. But, the good news here is that we’ve recently created better instrumentation on editor performance, meaning we have more metrics and dashboards we now monitor to keep an eye on this. There have already been cases where this has been handy - e.g. we rolled something out, noticed it caused an editor performance regression, and then quickly fixed that regression.

Yes - this is in the form of an older “experimental feature” in the editor, which will be staying around. To find it, go to Settings > Version. Once you turn the beta expression composer off, you should see the parentheses feature.

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Glad to hear the parentheses will still be working, we use them a lot!

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I personally want to thank you guys for always pushing the platform forward. Even if the idea doesn’t always work out. I used it a few times, but always ended up switching back to the old way.

On a side note, we can push those table beta updates when you are ready :wink:

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Thanks for anwsering this. Can’t wait for the new updates to the editor.

Totally understand the decisions made!

Fully understand this decision - looking forward to seeing what the future of the expression editor looks like with all the feedback from the beta implemented!

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What about parenthesis going into production?

As for element tree - Can you make this expand to currently selected item?

Hopefully, the newt composer will be AI enabled! Would be great to have Bubble write expressions for us.

+1 and same for trying to duplicate a group (which means the temporary padding has to be removed from both!)

I understand the decision, but I’m kinda bummed. The new expression composer has been my default editor mode for months and it’s going to be really tough to lose the ability to make changes to the middle of an expression without losing the end. Parentheses are also indispensable for me, but I will try the older version of that and hopefully it will be good enough.

Onward and upward, I look forward to future editor updates.

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Thanks, @allenyang, for the transparency! This makes sense – I’ve used the expression composer since the beta’s released and have definitely run into bugs where I had to turn it off, then back on.

Will definitely miss being able to insert dynamic expressions easily in the middle of text or editing longer expressions without using the expression, but it sounds like this is a good move!

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Sad to hear that feature is going down as I really liked it and using in all of my apps. But I suggest to keep one thing that is starting a dynamic expression shortcut by pressing “cmd+/” as it is really useful.

Please consider this suggestion.

Thanks

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Very very VERY happy to read this. I’m sure this was a really tough decision, but I personally think it’s the right one. My condolences to the engineers who’ve been working on it. Hope y’all buy those poor souls a few bottles of whiskey or like a massage or something.

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Sad to hear it goes like this. Really loved it and adapt it to the new composer. Seems like a downgrade back to legacy one. But please come back to a 2.0 version and improve it, or rethink it, send some more A/B testing to a target of users to find out what do they think.

Sometimes I think there are some many missed opportunities.

Oohh well. :man_shrugging: Hopefully the shortcut to start a dynamic expression is staying.

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I think this is probably the right call. Even from the early days of testing I was frustrated that the real pain points with expression composition weren’t adequately addressed in the new composer.

I really do hope the new revamp includes a way to reorder and edit individual sub-expressions as expressions themselves.

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The expression composer helps me so much. I hope we get it back ASAP after the revamp. Thanks for improving our bubble experience, more power to you.

I wanted to throw my two cents into this. I am also really saddened by this. Even though there were bugs, one of my favorite things was the ability to insert logic into the middle of an expression. That saved me so much time on complex expressions. Going back to to manually recreating the whole logic manually and inserting in the middle just to test something, is gonna really blow.

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