List Screens

Most of the work you do in your application happens on a list screen — any screen that shows many records at once, whether that looks like a spreadsheet-style table, a wall of cards, a board of columns or a calendar. This chapter explains the parts every list screen has in common, the layouts it can be shown in, how it loads, how you move through the pages, and what it means when a list comes back empty.

What A List Screen Is

A list screen is one set of records of one kind — orders, invoices, applicants, tickets, tasks — shown together with the controls for narrowing, sorting and acting on them.

Three things decide what you actually see:

• Which records. The screen was built to show a particular kind of record, already narrowed to a sensible starting set (for example "open tickets" rather than every ticket ever created).
• Which fields. Only some of the record's fields are shown as columns or card lines. Which ones depends on how the screen was set up and on what your role is allowed to see.
• Which layout. The same records can be presented as a table, as cards, as a board, and so on.

All three are decided by the person who set up your application. You can adjust a lot of it while you are on the screen — filters, columns, page size, sometimes the layout — and you can keep your adjustments as a saved view. What you cannot do from a list screen is change what the screen was built to show in the first place.

Example. The "Deliveries" entry in your menu opens a list screen of delivery records for the current month, shown as a table with the columns Number, Customer, Promised date and Status. A colleague in another team opens the same menu entry and sees the same records but without the Margin column, because their role is not allowed to see that field.

Why It Matters

Nearly everything else in this guide starts from a list screen. You filter here, you select records here, you run actions and exports here, and you open a record's detail screen by clicking it here. Recognizing the standard parts means you can sit down in front of a screen you have never seen before and know where the controls are.

The Anatomy Of A List Screen

Read a list screen top to bottom. Not every screen has every part — your administrator can remove or rearrange most of them — but when a part is present, it is in this position.

1. The Page Heading

At the very top of the page sits the heading for the whole page: the name of the screen you opened, sometimes with a short line of description underneath, and sometimes a group of buttons on the right. This heading belongs to the page, not to the list, and it is covered in The Application Window.

A page can hold more than one list. When it does, each list has its own heading of the kind described next.

2. The List Heading And Its Buttons

At the top of the list, above the filter bar:

• On the left, the list's own title. This is a heading in its own right, sometimes preceded by a small icon. If your administrator turned the title off, there is nothing here and the buttons on the right slide across to fill the space.

  Some lists are collapsible: the title is a link with a chevron next to it, and clicking it folds the entire list away and unfolds it again. This is useful on pages that stack several lists.

• On the right, the buttons. The most common is the add button — a solid button with a plus sign at its right-hand end, whose wording is chosen per screen (a screen that has never been given a caption falls back to the generic "new item"). It appears only if the screen was set up to offer it and your role may create that kind of record. Extra buttons your administrator has added sit next to it.

• A layout selector, if your administrator placed one. It usually sits here with the other buttons, but it can be placed elsewhere on the screen. See Switching The Layout below.

3. The Filter Bar

Below the heading comes the filter bar, usually laid out as two lines:

• The first line is about saved views: the name of the view you are currently looking at with a caret to switch to another, a star to mark one as your personal default, and — when the view has a description — an information button that shows it.
• The second line holds the tools (a live "Find on page..." box, the column picker, and the buttons that add filters, groupings, merges and calculations), then the chips showing what is currently active, then save and refresh.

The bar wraps on a narrow window, so on a laptop the chips and the save/refresh buttons often drop onto a line of their own.

Everything in the bar is covered in detail elsewhere: Filtering Your Data, Saved Views And Queries, and Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.

If your administrator turned the filter bar off for a screen, none of it appears — the records start immediately under the heading.

4. Optional Strips Between The Bar And The Records

Depending on how the screen was built, one or more of these can sit between the filter bar and the records:

• A folder tree for filing records into folders — see Tags And Folders.
• A tag cloud for filtering by tag — same chapter.
• Calculation chips, one per active calculation, each reading something like Sum: Amount | Displayed … | All …. They appear only once you (or the saved view) have added a calculation. See Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations.
• On a sortable table only, a tinted information strip telling you that dragging items around changes their order and that changes are saved automatically.

5. The Records

The middle of the screen: the rows, cards, board columns or calendar events themselves. What you can do here depends entirely on the layout, which is the subject of the next section.

One rule holds across all of them: clicking the empty background of a row or card does nothing. You open a record by clicking its title, or by using the per-record menu where one exists. See Record Detail Screens.

6. The Controls Underneath

Under the records, from left to right:

1. The page-size button, marked with a list icon and reading <rows shown> / <total rows> — for example 20 / 1543. Clicking it opens a menu upward with the available page sizes.
2. The page picker, marked with a page icon and reading <current page> of <last page> — for example 3 of 78. Clicking it opens a scrollable list of every page number.
3. The refresh button — a bordered button with a circular-arrows icon and no text.
4. The numbered pagination — a previous arrow, page numbers with an ellipsis standing in for each gap, and a next arrow.
5. On the far right, the actions menu — a button with three dots that opens a menu of the screen's actions, including the exports. See Action Buttons And Exporting.

Not every layout has all of these. Boards and calendars have no paging controls at all, and only table layouts get the three-dots actions menu.

7. Things Only Some People See

If you have administrator rights on the screen's configuration, hovering anywhere over the list reveals a small floating box of pencil, grid and database icons at its top right corner. It stays hidden until you hover, and ordinary users never see it at all. If a colleague describes a control you cannot find, this is one of the reasons — see Why Your Screen Differs.

The Layouts

A list screen is presented in one of six layouts. Each has its own chapter; the summaries below are there so you can recognize which one you are looking at and know what to expect from it.

Table

Rows and columns, one record per row. Column headers carry the sort and filter controls, columns can be resized and the whole table scrolls sideways inside its own box when there are many columns. The two table layouts are the only ones with checkboxes for selecting several records at once, and this is the richest layout overall.

Use it when you need to compare values across records, sort by a column, select many records, or export.

Details: Tables.

Table (Sortable)

The same table, plus a grip at the left of every row that you drag up and down to set the manual order of the records. The order is written the moment you drop the row — there is no confirmation step and no undo. A standing information strip above the table says so.

Use it for short lists whose sequence is meaningful: a checklist of process steps, a menu of options, a priority ranking.

Details: Tables.

Cards

A responsive grid of cards — one per record — with the record's title as the card heading and one line per shown field underneath. A card whose record has a color field is painted in that color, which makes status visible at a glance. On a wide screen you get four or five cards across; inside a pop-up window, at most two.

Use it when the records are visual or when a handful of fields tell the whole story.

Details: Cards, Lists And File Lists.

Simple List

The most minimal layout: one line per record, showing the record's title as a link — plus that record's tag chips, if your administrator turned tags on for the screen. Choosing columns has no effect here, because this layout does not render them.

Use it for compact pickers and side panels where all you need is a name to click.

Details: Cards, Lists And File Lists.

Board

A kanban board: a horizontally scrolling strip of columns, each column being one value of a chosen field (typically a status), each record a card you can drag from one column to another. Dragging a card writes the new value immediately. Each column shows a count badge and loads its cards twenty at a time behind a "Load more" button.

Use it to move work through stages.

Details: Boards.

Calendar

Records placed on a month grid, a week grid or a chronological list, using date fields chosen by your administrator. You can move to the previous or next period, jump back to today, and — if your role allows it — drag an event to a new date, resize it, or drag across empty slots to create a new record.

Use it when when matters more than what.

Details: Calendars.

File Lists Are A Separate Screen

Files are a special case, and not a seventh layout. If your application licenses it, there is a separate File repository screen that lists files rather than records. It has its own switch between a card grid, a compact list and a table, its own folder tree, and — unlike the record lists above — a genuine selection count with a bulk-action bar.

Details: Cards, Lists And File Lists.

What Each Layout Supports

The differences below trip people up more than anything else on a list screen. A colleague tells you to "tick the ones you want and run the action"; you are looking at the same records as cards, and there are no tick boxes anywhere.

Selecting Records And Per-Record Menus

Two consequences worth remembering:

• In record lists there is no selection counter and no bulk toolbar. A selected row is shown by a checked box and a tinted background, nothing else. Only the File repository shows you a count.
• The card three-dots button is revealed by hovering over the card, which makes it awkward or impossible to reach on a touchscreen. On a tablet, treat cards as read-and-open.

See Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

Dragging And Grouping

Grouping and the folder tree are covered in Columns, Grouping, Merging And Calculations and Tags And Folders.

Paging And The Actions Menu

The last column is a hard rule rather than a setting: exports and the screen's action buttons live only on table layouts. If you need to export what you are looking at on a board or a calendar, ask for a table version of the same screen.

Switching The Layout

Most screens are fixed to the layout they were designed for. That is the normal case: your administrator chose a board because the work is a pipeline, or a calendar because the work is a schedule, and there is no control to change it.

Where your administrator has enabled it, a small layout selector appears, usually in the list heading: an icon-only button showing the current layout's icon, with a caret. Clicking it opens a short menu headed "Viewer", listing the layouts you may switch to — Table, Table (sortable), List, Cards, Calendar and Kanban, each with its own icon, with the current one highlighted. Only the layouts your administrator prepared for that screen are listed, and the selector appears at all only when there is more than one of them.

What to expect when you switch:

• The list reloads in the new layout without leaving the page.
• Your choice is remembered for that one screen, in that one browser. It is not saved to your account, so it does not follow you to another browser or another device, and colleagues still see the screen's configured layout. It lasts as long as your session does — typically days rather than minutes — so expect the screen to still be in your chosen layout when you come back to it later.
• Switching back to the configured layout clears your choice.
• The controls can change with the layout. Filters, columns and paging are arranged per layout, so a screen that has a column picker as a table may have none as a board, and the export menu disappears the moment you leave a table.
• On a few screens the selector is absent by design because the underlying data source does not support anything but a table.

Example. Your "Support tickets" screen offers both Table and Kanban, and is set up to open as a board. You spend the morning on the board, dragging tickets from Triage to In progress. In the afternoon you need to send the week's tickets to a colleague, so you switch to Table, tick nothing, and use the three-dots menu to export. When you open the screen the next morning it is still a table, because your switch is remembered for you in this browser. Pick Kanban from the selector again to get the board back — your colleagues never saw the table at all.

How A List Loads

Lists do not arrive with the page. They arrive shortly afterward, on their own.

The Shimmering Placeholder

When you open a screen, each list first paints a placeholder: a set of gray blocks that pulse gently in roughly the shape of the real thing. A table draws a fake toolbar, three fake filter chips and six fake rows; cards draw a fake grid; a board draws four fake columns; a calendar draws a fake month grid. Screen readers announce it as loading.

The placeholder is not data. Nothing in it is real, and nothing in it is clickable. As soon as the records come back, the placeholder is replaced by the list.

Several Lists On One Page Load Independently

A dashboard or a record detail screen can hold several lists. Each one fetches its own data separately, so they finish at different times: three small lists may be there instantly while a fourth, heavier one keeps shimmering for another twenty seconds.

This is normal, and it is also why refreshing one list does not refresh its neighbors.

Why A Page Can Look "Arrived" While A List Is Still Working

Because the page frame, the navigation and the heading are all drawn before the records are requested, a slow list looks like a finished page with a gray box in the middle. There is no percentage, no row counter and no estimate. While a request is in flight you get a thin progress bar pinned to the top of the window (or to the top of the pop-up, when the list is inside one), which is the only indication that something is still happening.

What to do about it:

• Wait. Give a heavy list a minute before deciding it is stuck.
• If it never finishes and you eventually get an error dialog instead, the usual cause is that the request took too long. Reduce the page size, narrow the filters, and try again — see Large Lists And Performance and When Something Goes Wrong.

How Many Records You See At Once

The page-size button under the list — the one reading <rows shown> / <total rows> — controls how many records are fetched per page.

The Fixed Choices

The choices are 10, 20, 30, 50, 75, 100, 250 and 500, and they are the same in every application. Nobody can add a different number to this menu.

Underneath them, separated by a divider, an extra entry reading All <total> appears only when the whole result is smaller than 500. For a list of 137 records you get "All 137"; for a list of 900 you do not, and 500 is the most you can put on one page.

The Default

Every application has a default page size, normally 20, chosen once by your administrator. A saved view can carry its own page size that overrides it — a screen built on short reference lists might open at 100.

How Long Your Choice Lasts

Choosing a page size is a change to the state of that screen, in the same family as filters, sort and columns:

• It stays put while you page, sort, filter and use the browser's Back and Forward buttons.
• It survives reloading the page, and it travels in the link if you copy the address to a colleague.
• It is not stored on your account. Coming back to the screen fresh from the menu tomorrow starts from the default again.
• Switching to a different saved view resets it, along with your other on-screen adjustments.
• If you save your arrangement as a saved view, the page size is saved with it — see Saved Views And Queries.

Choosing Well

Bigger pages are not free. The whole page has to be fetched and built before you see any of it, so a large page of a record type with many fields and links takes noticeably longer than a large page of a simple one. If a list is slow, the first thing to try is a smaller page — see Large Lists And Performance.

Example. You need to check that every one of 180 invoices for last month has a purchase-order number. At 20 per page that is nine pages of scrolling and a real chance of losing your place. You open the page-size menu, pick "All 180", and read the whole month in one pass. Next month there are 640 invoices, "All" is not offered, and you work in pages of 250 instead — or, better, add a filter for "purchase order is not set" and check the handful that comes back.

Moving Between Pages

Three controls do overlapping jobs, so use whichever suits the distance you are traveling.

The Page Picker

The button reading 3 of 78 opens a scrollable list of every page number. Use it to jump a long way — page 3 to page 60 — without clicking through.

The menu holds one entry per page, so on a list with hundreds of pages it becomes very long and awkward to scroll. That is another reason to prefer a larger page size or a tighter filter over a list with hundreds of pages.

The Numbered Pagination

To the right sits the familiar row of page numbers with previous and next arrows. It always offers the first two pages, the pages either side of the one you are on, and the last two, with an ellipsis covering each gap — so when you are somewhere in the middle of a long list you see two of them.

Two things to know:

• On a narrow window the numbers disappear and only the previous and next arrows remain.
• The same happens inside a pop-up window, whatever its width. If a list inside a pop-up seems to have lost its pagination, look for the two arrows.

"Load More"

Board columns do not page. Each column loads twenty cards, and if there are more, a full-width button at the bottom of the column adds the next twenty to that column only. Changing a filter redraws the whole board and puts every column back to its first twenty.

Nothing in the product loads more records as you scroll — there is no infinite scrolling anywhere.

One Thing Paging Does Not Do

Changing the page does not change your selection in any useful way. A selection only covers the rows currently drawn, and redrawing the list clears it. Do not tick rows on page 1, move to page 2, and expect to have twelve records selected. See Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

Refreshing A List

Lists never update themselves. What you are looking at is what the application read at the moment the list loaded. If a colleague edits a record, or a scheduled process runs in the background, your open list keeps showing the old picture indefinitely. Only notifications and background export jobs arrive on their own.

The refresh button — the circular-arrows icon, both in the filter bar and next to the page picker — re-runs exactly the query you are looking at: same filters, same sort, same grouping, same columns, same page. It is the supported way to pull current data without losing your setup, and it is better than reloading the browser page, because much of your on-screen arrangement lives in the address bar and a reload can be a rougher ride.

The button carries no text and no tooltip, so it is easy to overlook. Look for the two arrows chasing each other in a circle.

More on this, including what state survives what, is in Saved Views And Queries.

Example. You and a colleague are working through the same queue of new applications. You refresh, take the top three, and process them. Ten minutes later your list still shows the same queue — including two applications your colleague has already taken. Pressing refresh before each new batch, rather than trusting the screen, is the habit that avoids the duplicated work.

When A List Is Empty

An empty list is drawn as a panel where the records would be. The default message is "No data match the query.", but your administrator can replace it per screen with something more helpful, so the exact wording varies. The panel looks different from layout to layout — a dashed box with an inbox icon on a table, a plain tinted box with or without an information icon elsewhere — but it says the same thing.

There are three different reasons for it, and the screen does not always distinguish them.

There Are No Records Yet

The genuine empty case: nothing of this kind exists, or nothing matches the screen's own built-in starting conditions. You get the panel and its message, and no other control.

If you may create records here, the add button in the heading is your next step.

Your Filters Exclude Everything

If at least one filter chip is active, the empty panel gains a small "Remove filters" button that clears them all at once. That button is the tell. Its presence means your own filters are responsible; its absence means they are not.

It is also the only "clear all filters" control in the product — there is none in the filter bar itself.

You Are Not Allowed To See Them

Permissions are applied to the records themselves, not to the screen. If your role may not see any of these records, the list is simply empty — the same panel, the same message, no explanation.

This case is genuinely indistinguishable from "there are no records" by looking at the screen. Signs that point at it:

• A colleague on the same screen sees rows and you see none.
• You can see the records elsewhere — in a search result, or linked from another record — but not here.
• The total in the page-size button reads 0 / 0 on a screen that everybody agrees has data.

There Are Filters You Cannot See

One more possibility, and the most confusing: your administrator can lock filters onto a screen that never appear as chips. They narrow the records but are invisible and cannot be removed, so a list can legitimately show fewer records than the visible filters explain — sometimes none at all. If the arithmetic on a screen does not add up, this is worth asking about. See Filtering Your Data.

Empty In The Other Layouts

• A board with no records shows the message in the board area. A board that has lost its grouping shows "No active boards." instead — that is not a data problem, it is the board having nothing to make columns from, and it happens if the grouping is removed from the filter bar.
• A calendar in list mode shows "No events to display" for the period you are looking at. In month or week mode it just shows an empty grid. Remember that a calendar shows a period, not a page: an empty March does not mean there are no records, only none in March.

Lists In Other Places

Lists Inside A Record

A record's detail screen can carry whole list screens on its own tabs — the invoices for this customer, the tasks under this project, the documents attached to this case. These are real lists with their own filters, their own paging and their own refresh, and everything in this chapter applies to them.

The difference is scope: such a list is normally pre-narrowed to the record you are looking at, and that narrowing is one of the locked filters described above. You cannot widen it from inside.

See Record Detail Screens.

Lists Inside Pop-Up Windows

Opening a record from a list usually opens a pop-up window over the screen, and that pop-up can itself contain lists. These behave the same way with three practical differences:

• The numbered page links are hidden. Only the previous and next arrows remain, at any width.
• Layouts are narrower. Cards drop to at most two across, and a board shows at most two columns at a time.
• The pop-up's list pages independently of the list behind it. Moving to page 2 inside the pop-up does not touch the screen underneath, and closing the pop-up does not carry your position back.

See Pop-Up Windows.

Public Pages

A screen can be published so that people who are not signed in can open it — a public register, a price list, an availability calendar.

On a public page the records are shown, but the per-record controls are removed: no checkboxes, no per-record menu, and no button for managing a record's tags. Filtering and paging still work, so a public page remains browsable. If a public page is later withdrawn, the link stops working and visitors get a plain page saying that someone shared a link to a page which is no longer available.

If you are signed in and open a public link, you see the public version, not your normal one — the row controls are absent because of the page, not because of your permissions.

Worked Example: Reading An Unfamiliar Screen

You have been added to the Logistics team and someone sends you a link to "Shipments this week".

1. The page arrives instantly and the middle is gray and pulsing. That is the placeholder. You wait; after a few seconds a table appears.
2. You read the bottom left: 20 / 412. Twenty rows on this page, 412 shipments in total. The page picker next to it reads 1 of 21.
3. You read the filter bar. The saved-view button says "This week", and there is one chip: Status equals "In transit". So the 412 is already narrowed twice — once by the saved view, once by a filter someone left active.
4. You remove the status chip with its small cross. The list re-queries; the count becomes 20 / 906.
5. You raise the page size to 100 so you can scan a whole day at a time. The counter becomes 100 / 906 and the page picker becomes 1 of 10.
6. You want the whole thing in a spreadsheet, so you check that you are on a table layout — you are, the three-dots button is at the bottom right — and use it to export. The file arrives through the jobs tray in the topbar, not immediately in the browser; see Action Buttons And Exporting.
7. An hour later you want current numbers. You press the circular-arrows button rather than reloading the page, and your page size, filters and position are all preserved.

Tips And Gotchas

• A list is a snapshot. Nothing on it is live. When accuracy matters — before a call, before a decision, before an export — press refresh first.
• The tick boxes only exist on tables. If a procedure tells you to select records and you cannot, check what layout you are on before assuming you lack permission.
• A selection covers the current page only. "Select all" in the header ticks the rows drawn, not the whole result set, and any sort, filter, page or column change clears it.
• Running an action with nothing selected is not the same as canceling it. On most screens it means "everything that matches the current filters". Be deliberate. See Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.
• "All N" vanishes once a list reaches 500 records. If the entry you used last week is gone, the list has grown. Filter it down or work in pages of 500.
• Group headings always come back expanded. Collapsing a group is a display convenience only; any refresh, sort, filter or page change re-expands everything.
• Some screens are built on a hand-written data source. You can recognize them: the row-count button does not open, there is no column picker, the column headers carry no filter funnels, and there are no per-row controls. On such a screen the whole result is fetched at once and the page size is not yours to choose.
• Column widths you drag are stored in your browser, not on your account. They do not follow you to another computer, and clearing your browser data resets them.
• There is no printing. The application has no print layout and no print action; pressing your browser's print command gives you the screen as it is, navigation and all. Export to a spreadsheet instead.
• There is no undo. Dragging a row in a sortable table, dragging a card on a board and dragging an event on a calendar all save immediately, with no confirmation step and nothing to reverse them but doing it again by hand.
• If a list fails, you get one generic dialog headed "Error When Processing Request", whose own advice is to select fewer items at once. It cannot tell a timeout from a lost connection. See When Something Goes Wrong.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

You cannot change how a screen is built, but everything below is a normal request. Phrase it in terms of the outcome you want.

• "Can this screen be a board / calendar / table instead?" — the layout is a setting on the screen. If different people want different things, ask for the layout selector to be added so each of you can choose.
• "Can we get the export button here?" — exports and action buttons only exist on table layouts. The usual answer is either a table version of the screen or the layout selector.
• "Can this screen open at 100 per page?" — a screen can be given its own default page size.
• "Can this list stop hiding rows from me?" — locked filters and record permissions both do this. Say which records you expected and which you got.
• "Can the empty message say something useful?" — the text shown when a list has nothing in it is set per screen; "No open orders — use the New order button above" beats the default.
• "Can we add a folder tree / tag filter / quick filter buttons here?" — these are components your administrator places on the screen.

A fuller catalog is in What To Ask Your Administrator For.

Related Chapters

• Tables
• Cards, Lists And File Lists
• Filtering Your Data
• Saved Views And Queries
• Selecting Records And Bulk Actions