Introducing beta (previously, experimental) features (including parentheses)!

I didn’t want to overthink this, just wanted to test it out with the example given in the Versions tab :slight_smile:

1 Like

@grace.hong - love this level of interaction with your users. As developers ourselves, I’m sure the community would appreciate how challenging it is to be so open with your beta process and how readily you take on & integrate the feedback. +1 to everyone involved!

5 Likes

I need to do more testing, but my first impression is that it’s promising. However, you might consider ensuring parentheses don’t appear elsewhere in expressions in order to avoid “parenthetical overload” and thus reduce the amount of “mental parsing” the user must perform to make sense of the expression…

1 Like

Love this thanks @jmalmeida!

1 Like

This is a great new feature, I’ve already left feedback that I hope you find valuable on both of these features.

Would you consider opening up to a feedback feature on other areas as well straight into the editor? There is a lot of areas where the UX could crowdsource context aware input which possibly would make it easier to spot low hanging fruit and rank issues by input.

1 Like

Love this!

Thanks for the feedback everyone (please keep it coming!).

@jmalmeida Yup, you are correct in that there are workarounds today that allow you to establish order of operations in your dynamic expressions. In that sense, having parentheses through a datasource would somewhat align with precedence, but the difficulty will lie within how/if individual parentheses are deleted/added. Feel free to continue this conversation - it’d be helpful to know whether users prefer automatically added parentheses or manually added parentheses.

@alxgrepe That sounds like a great idea – would add it to our Ideaboard here!

1 Like

Parenthsis is great! Tired of using many groups for my expressions🥂

1 Like

wow

parentheses !!!

thanks

Next can we have a “is contained” please

It would seem that “Copy/Paste Expression” does not function when using Parentheses within the expression. Which is a bummer when performing long complex expressions with slight changes meaning each one has to be manually configured, particularly since one bracket in the wrong place can render the output incorrect.

So implementing this ability would be a massive help.

Thanks.

6 Likes

Love the initiative!! Could you please let us choose where to put the parenthesis? Making it automatic lets the software choose where to put them, and sometimes they don’t work on certain formulas.

3 Likes

Hi! I think the ability to build more complex expressions has been one of the key features we are missing. Parentheses look like a step in this direction. For how Bubble is implementing this and what you mentioned before, I understand that one challenge is how to let the user build the expression correctly without messing with open/ending parenthesis.

I can imagine two ways here:
A) Allowing build expressions more freely (just typing), like opening a ‘(’, and with some validations as currently are, warning for example that the expression is incorrect because there are more ‘(’ than ‘)’.
B) Making the expression editor more like boxes (parent/child scheme), as we usually see in many codes like HTML. Similar to the existing Arbitrary text that was mentioned before, but more in a visual and easy way to build and edit expressions. In this scenario, including a parenthesis may add a ‘(’ and ‘)’ and you may move/drop each part where you want.
I understand this probably requires important changes in the current expressions system, but I honestly think the ability to build big and complex expressions is key for many apps.

Thanks!

2 Likes

I’ve been using this quite extensively the past few weeks - And have been able to do everything I wasn’t able to do in the past, including long addition and subtraction equations. In my humble opinion, this is working well enough to satisfy my needs as a long time Bubble power user.

What isn’t working well is the ability to copy an expression within a parenthesis and paste it. We still have the paradigm that copying an expression copies everything… so taking one piece of a long dynamic expression and just trying to grab one piece is still beyond our grasp.

5 Likes

Can anyone advise if theres a particular method to inserting the parentheses?

I’m creating a custom formula but it seems that when using the point and click tool is inserting variables in the wrong places. Manually typing out the formula with parentheses doesn’t seem to work either which would make generating a formula much quicker.

1 Like

Hi @grace.hong is there any news about the official release date of parenthesis? It is months after your post about this test release. Also, when using this at this moment, is there the change it will break once the official release is out?

1 Like

We’ve received a great deal of feedback that has helped us prioritize this as a project going forward! There’s quite an amout of work required to get the interaction model right since users mentioned that the prototype as it stands can use some refinements. Therefore, it’s difficult to necessarily provide an estimated launch date.

For whatever we launch, we’re likely not changing how expressions are stored on Bubble, and even if we did, you should be able to preserve the capabilities created through the experimental paretheses feature.

9 Likes

It’s amazing how the simple parenthesis can help form much more complicated equations in a more simple way. Really need this.

What I’ve been doing a lot for complicated equations is to set up custom states to hold the value that I would normally place inside of parenthesis. Maybe there is a better way to do it, but having the option to just use parenthesis makes life a lot easier. Hopefully this can get perfected well.

3 Likes

Thank you for this clarification. Even in its current not so friendly shape, the experimental parenthesis feature is a big leap in experience of creating/updating expressions. Thank you for this.

So like you said, yes, please make sure the expressions created with experimental parenthesis feature are kept intact even after a well rounded solution is built.

Hi @grace.hong
I can’t see the Deferral Drawing, only the other 2.
Do you know why?

Thanks

It’s part of the 21 update as standard I believe!