"Make this File private and attach this file to" possible improvements

Hi @josh

Say a marketplace app where end users create a product and want to attach pictures to that product and and these screenshots need to have privacy rules.

It’s counterintuitive from a UX perspective to present the user with a form where he creates the product and then after he creates the product he has to upload pictures. It adds a barrier of completion or forces you to do a multistep workflow where it may make no sense(few fields).

Two possible improvements:

a) Add a checkbox in the create/make a change thing workflow action that appears under any field that has a File data type. If checked it will attach the File or List of Files automatically to the thing that is being created/changed.

b) Create a new workflow action that allows you to attach a File or list of Files to any thing. This would substitute the functionality in the file element properties.

Cheers

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I’m not sure I’m understanding what your original issue is. You want to have a single step form that lets you create a thing and add photos to that thing. I do this all the time in my apps, so I’m thinking I’m misunderstanding you. Could you clarify your original issue?

Yes. Sorry my bad. Indeed it’s not clear in my post. I will edit :slight_smile:

I’m talking about the private file :slight_smile:

image

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Oh, gotcha. Yep, never used that :stuck_out_tongue:

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The problem is for that field to work, the thing needs to exist previously.
So basically you can’t use that property of the element when you are creating something from scratch.
Thus my proposal to move it to the workflow system to give more flexibility.

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@JonL thank you for the original post. I think it’s the right question to ask, given the nature of your use case. I’ve thought about it a bit, and I’m thinking you could create the thing upon page load, for example, so the thing exists previous to when you would need to attach the file to the thing

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It’s an option indeed, but it would add two unnecessary DB operations in case user decides to not go through. It’s a valid workaround indeed but affects performance for nothing. And we know that adding performance bloat will come to bite us hard later on given that the main issue right now with Bubble is that :slight_smile:

You’re right, creating things isn’t free. But one more thing being created that a lot of the time would be created anyway isn’t likely to be a huge deal

Actually, you just gave me an idea. I will add a click count on the button that opens the form and will compare with the amount of people that actually submit it. As you say, it might be worth going through the workaround route.
I just have a feeling that people just like clicking for the sake of clicking :stuck_out_tongue:

I understand it’s not a priority, but having it on the workflow makes more sense for many reasons. You could add even further validation to the files before they are uploaded :slight_smile:

I have the same problem in my app. For privicy settings to work I need to attach to file to a thing that is not yet created…

I have also the same use case: Upload a profile image to a employee thing thing that is not yet created, but I want to have the profile image to be private. Can someone clarify how to solve this from a workflow perspective? I tried to create a thing and then to make changes to the thing just created, but I can’t make the image private.

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Any updates on this?

has anyone figured out how to do this yet?

Any update on this? This feature is severely needed.

We had the same issue.

I figured it out, attaching it to the current user first.
Once you created a thing, you trigger a backend workflow that re-uploads the file and attaches it to the created thing. Then, you delete the previous file.

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Are you willing to share how exactly you made this work?
In the backend workflow i can only find an option to delete an uploaded file.

Actually, it’s better to create a thing before uploading a file. Then, you can have a workflow that deletes these dummy things if needed.
There is a problem with re-uploading large files - it just fails. So, that’s why it’s a good idea to attach uploading files to the created thing.