Introduction to Actions

An introduction to Simple & Custom actions.

A useful way to think about apps is through the way users interact with them. Two very basic levels of interaction are viewing & editing data.

But very often, apps need to be able to perform Actions.

For example, in this app, we have a button that when clicked will take people to a website. This is because the button has the action Open Link enabled.

You may not have thought of it this way before, but opening a Form is a type of action. If you look closely in the Form Button's configuration, you will see the action 'Show Form' enabled.

Open link and show form are examples of Simple Actions, but Glide also has an Action Editor where you can join actions together into more complex workflows. We call these Custom Actions.

Types of Actions

There are many different actions in Glide. Mostly, they fall into four categories.

Data actions use or change data. These include things like

Navigation actions show or move users to different screens. For example:

Communication actions trigger things like emails, text messages, and phone calls and Advanced actions are for more technical users.

Generally, actions are the same in Apps & Pages, but you'll find some actions only live in certain places.

Action locations

There are various places where you can add actions. Again, these differ between apps and pages, but there are some general themes.

Component actions

Some components have actions, and some do not. If a component has the option for an action, you’ll see it in the component’s configuration.

List actions

The default action for clicking on a list item is to view that item’s details screen. This is such a normal behaviour, you might not have thought of it as an action before.

But you can change this to a number of other actions. For example, you could have;

A list of contacts that when tapped, triggers the dial phone number action.
A list of inventory items that when tapped, decrements a number.

In Apps, lists have only a single action, but in pages, collections have many different actions.

This table is a good example. It shows a lot of information but is really compact. There’s inline search and filtering and many new locations for actions. At the top of the list, we have our main actions and a dropdown menu for even more. And each item has its own buttons, to edit or preview and has its own dropdown menu.

On Submit Actions

Another type of action is the on-submit action.

After users add/edit or submit forms — you have the option to add actions that trigger on submit.

Where can you add actions?

Here is a basic list of the places you can add actions. This is likely to change over time so may not be comprehensive.

Apps

Components
On submit
Lists