So… hitting a snag. I have a certain data type that comes back to me from an external API (one of my own). The data type that it returns is a complex data type with various fields including a name/summary, various dates, etc. and it describes an “Event” (in the database it’s referred to as an “iCalfromURL Event”). They come back to me as a list of these things and I attach them an object in the database (a Calendar in this case).
So, the Calendar data type has a list of "iCalfromURL Event"s on it.
So my API returns a list of these things and those get stored in the database. But what I can do with these is somewhat limited.
Things of “iCalfromURL Event” are not exposed in the database and only partially exposed in workflows. For example, while I can get one of these “Event” things out of a list of them they are not things that can be “Do a search for…” or Create a New Thing of this type.
But I have a need for creating new things of this type DIRECTLY IN MY APP. Is there a way to do that? Am I missing something? I fear I may have caused myself a giant pain in the butt here…
If you’ve never run across this, let me show you what happens:
Here’s what my (quite clever and well written I must say ) API returns:
As you can see, here is where “iCalFromURL Event” comes from. The complex JSON datatype is automagically created by Bubble.
However, when you do something this way, that “iCalFromURL Event” data type does not bubble up into the app’s data types. They seem to be in some kind of weird ghetto that’s isolated from other data types I’ve created.
Looking in my database, we can see that, seemingly, this data type does not exist. One would expect that it would show up somewhere around here:
And even though there are zillions of these "iCalFromURL Event"s in my database, neither do they “bubble up” to the App Data section:
The only way one can “see” or expose them is in a workflow or repeating group type of thing. Here for example. Inside of Bubble editor, we find these API data types near the bottom of the list of all data types in our app:
And then we can retrieve things of this type from things they are attached to. Like so:
That Calendar’s “Events” is a list of “iCalFromURL Events”.
So you would think that – if one needed to make a new thing of this type – one could do that. However, you can’t – the type does not show up anywhere in the Create New / Make Changes to Things workflow elements:
See? Nowhere…
So… WHY IS THIS? Is this a bug? Why do API-returned complex data types not “exist” as core data types in Bubble???
This is kinda freaking me out at the moment as don’t want to have to call out to my API just to CREATE one of these things. That would be stupid… but it might be necessary. HEAVY SIGH.