Pop-Up Windows

Most of the time, when you open a record, edit something, or run an action, your application does not take you to a new page. It slides a panel in over the side of the screen instead. This chapter explains what those panels are, how to control them, how they stack, and what happens to the screen behind them.

What A Pop-Up Window Is

A pop-up window is a tall panel that slides in from the right edge of the screen and covers part of the page you were on.

It is full height, and on a wide screen it takes roughly the right-hand 40% of the window. On narrower screens it takes more: about 60% on a small laptop, about 70% on a tablet.
On a phone it becomes a full-screen sheet with rounded top corners, covering the page entirely.
The page behind stays fully visible — it is not dimmed or grayed out — but it is inactive. You cannot scroll it and you cannot click anything on it. A click on the page behind closes the pop-up instead (see Closing A Pop-Up Window).

The application does not give these panels a name on screen. The only place a name appears at all is in the confirmation message you get when you close one with unsaved changes, which calls it a "modal". This guide calls them pop-up windows or pop-ups throughout.

Example You are looking at a list of orders. You click order 2025-0417. The list stays where it is — same filters, same scroll position, same page number — and the order slides in on the right. You read what you needed, close the panel, and you are back in exactly the same place in the list.

Why It Matters

Pop-ups exist so that you never lose the screen you were working on.

You keep your place. A list you filtered, sorted and paged through is still there when the pop-up closes. Nothing has to be set up again.
You keep your context. When an order shows a customer, you can open that customer, read or fix something, and come straight back — with the order still on screen underneath.
The screen behind updates itself. After you save, the list or record card behind the pop-up usually re-reads the data and shows the new values without you doing anything.

The trade-off is that the pop-up is a layer, not a page. A few things behave differently as a result — the browser Back button, the address bar and unsaved work all have their own rules, and they are covered below.

What Opens In A Pop-Up Window

Which things open as a pop-up depends on how your application is set up, but the following are the usual ones:

Clicking a record's title in a list — in a table, a card layout, a simple list, a file list, or a card on a board.
Clicking a related record shown inside another record. For example the customer name on an order, or the project name on a task.
Items in the row menu you get by right-clicking a table row: the record's tabs, Edit, Duplicate, Delete, and entries for creating a related record (these read New followed by the record type).
The add button above or beside a list, and the edit, duplicate and delete entries in the Actions menu at the top of a record.
The small "Create" link under a relation field in a form, which lets you create the related record without leaving the form you are filling in.
Some action buttons, when your administrator has configured them to open in a pop-up rather than navigate to a page or open a new tab.

Two things are worth knowing:

A related value is only a clickable link if you are allowed to see at least one part of the record behind it. If your role cannot open that kind of record at all, the same value shows as plain text with no link — which is why a colleague may be able to click something you cannot. See Why Your Screen Differs.
If the record has been deleted, or you are not allowed to see it, the panel opens anyway and shows a warning that the record is not available. A small progress bar runs in its header and the panel closes itself after about four seconds. You do not have to close it yourself, though the panel also carries a close button if you would rather not wait.

The Controls On A Pop-Up Window

On a desktop or laptop screen there is a small pair of buttons floating at the top right corner of the panel, just outside its content.

Control	What it looks like	What it does
Wide/narrow toggle	A two-arrow icon that flips between "spread apart" and "pull together"; its tooltip reads "Switch to large view"	Widens the panel to about 90% of the window. Click it again to go back to the normal width.
Close	A chevron pointing at a bar on the right, tooltip "Hide window"	Closes this panel.

The Wide/Narrow Toggle

Use it whenever the panel is too cramped — a wide table inside a record, a long form with side-by-side groups, a document preview.

The toggle is purely a display change on your own screen. It does not reload anything, does not save anything, and does not affect what your colleagues see. It is not remembered: the next pop-up you open comes back at the normal width.

There is one exception. Your administrator can mark a whole kind of record as one that should open wide. When they have, pop-ups for that record type open already expanded, and the same button shrinks them back. That setting applies to newly opened panels only.

Example Invoices in your application carry a long lines table. Your administrator marks the invoice record type as one that opens wide, so every invoice pop-up opens at the larger size. Customer records are not marked, so they still open narrow — and you widen those manually on the rare occasion you need to.

The Close Control

The close button closes only the panel it belongs to. If pop-ups are stacked, everything underneath stays exactly as it was.

On A Phone Or Narrow Screen

Below roughly 768 pixels wide the two-button group is replaced by a single X in the top right corner of the sheet. There is no wide/narrow toggle on a phone, because the sheet is already full screen.

While The Pop-Up Is Busy

A pop-up does not show a spinning wheel while it works. Instead:

A thin animated bar in your application's accent color runs across the top edge of the panel while it is fetching something.
A faint translucent layer covers the panel content and the mouse pointer becomes a "wait" cursor. That layer deliberately swallows clicks, so you cannot click twice by accident.
While that layer is up, the panel's own wide/narrow and close buttons do not respond. Esc still works.

If the request was started from the main page rather than from inside a panel, the same bar appears pinned to the very top of the browser window instead.

Lists inside a pop-up load in two steps: first a set of pale placeholder blocks that pulse gently, then the actual rows a moment later. That is normal. See List Screens.

Pop-Ups Inside Pop-Ups

You can open a record from inside a pop-up, and it opens as a new panel on top of the previous one. This is how nested editing works, and it is the main reason the panels exist at all.

Each older panel slides about 50 pixels further to the left so a sliver of it stays visible at the edge. You can see at a glance how deep you are.
Only the topmost panel is active. Everything below it — including other panels — is frozen until you close what is on top.
There is no fixed limit to how deep you can go. Every extra level pushes the older panels another 50 pixels left, so on a normal screen the oldest ones eventually run off the edge, and the stack becomes hard to read long before that. Two or three levels is comfortable; more than four is usually a sign you should close some panels and start again from a list.

How You Get Back

There is no back arrow or breadcrumb inside a pop-up. You get back by closing the panel on top — with its close button, with Esc, or with the browser Back button.

Closing a panel does nothing to the one underneath: it stays open, on the same tab, scrolled to the same place. Closing on its own never re-reads any data — the refresh of the screens behind is triggered by saving, not by closing. See What Happens To The Screen Behind When You Save.

Tabs Inside A Pop-Up Do Not Stack

Switching between the tabs of a record that is open in a pop-up replaces the content of that same panel. It does not open a new one, and it does not add a browser Back step. Only opening a different record (or an edit, delete or create screen) stacks a new panel.

When you are filling in a form and a field points at another kind of record, there is often a small "Create" link under that field. Clicking it opens a child pop-up with a blank form for the related record.

When you save that child form, the child panel closes and the record you just created is selected automatically in the field of the form underneath. For a field that accepts several values, the new record is added to what was already selected.

Example You are entering a new order and the customer you need is not in the customer dropdown yet. Instead of abandoning the half-filled order, you click Create under the customer field. A pop-up opens on top with a blank customer form. You fill in the name and save. The customer panel closes, and the customer field on your half-filled order now shows the customer you just created. Nothing you had already typed into the order was lost.

Whether the "Create" link appears depends on the field's configuration and on whether you are allowed to create that kind of record at all.

Closing A Pop-Up Window

There are four ways a pop-up closes.

The close button in the panel's top right corner (the X on a phone).
The Esc key — this closes the topmost panel.
Clicking anywhere on the page behind. Because the page behind is not dimmed, this often happens by accident: you go to click something on the list underneath, and the pop-up closes instead.
Automatically. After you successfully create or edit a record, the application closes the panel for you. Some screens close the whole stack. An administrator can also configure a rule that closes the top panel as part of an automated step.

There is normally no Cancel button on a create or edit form. To abandon what you are filling in, you close the pop-up. See Creating And Editing Records.

The Unsaved-Changes Prompt

If you have changed at least one field in the pop-up and have not saved, closing it with the close button, with Esc, or by clicking outside brings up a small confirmation box from your browser reading:

By closing this modal you may lose unsaved changes. Continue?

Cancel / stay on the page keeps the pop-up open, with everything you typed intact.
OK closes the pop-up and discards everything you typed. There is no undo anywhere in the application, so this cannot be reversed.

This prompt is the only unsaved-work protection in the application, and it exists only for pop-up windows. A form that fills a whole page — and closing the browser tab, reloading the page, or navigating away — gives you no warning at all.

Two details about when the prompt appears:

It appears once a field has actually registered a change. For a text box that happens when you leave the field, not while you are typing. If you type something and immediately hit Esc without leaving the box, the prompt may not appear.
Filter boxes do not count. Filtering a list that is displayed inside a pop-up does not mark the panel as having unsaved changes, so filtering and then closing never prompts you.

Treat the prompt as a helpful reminder, not a safety net. Save first when the work matters.

When The Prompt Does Not Appear At All

The confirmation is skipped, and unsaved work is lost silently, in all of these cases:

You press the browser Back button instead of closing the panel.
The application closes the panel itself after a successful save (there is nothing unsaved at that point, so this is harmless).
Your session expires — see If Your Session Expires While A Pop-Up Is Open.
You close the browser tab or reload the page.

`Esc` Does Two Things At Once

Esc closes the topmost pop-up, and it also cancels whatever request is currently running. If you press Esc while a save is in progress, you cancel your browser's wait for the answer — but the application may already have saved the record on the server. You are left with no success message and a list that looks unchanged.

If that happens, do not save again immediately. Refresh the list first (see Saved Views And Queries) and check whether the record is already there.

What Happens To The Screen Behind When You Save

When you save inside a pop-up, three things happen in quick succession:

A short confirmation message appears in the bottom right corner ("Record created.", "Record updated." or "Record deleted." in an unmodified application). It disappears by itself after about five seconds and is not kept anywhere.
The pop-up closes.
The screen behind re-reads its data and redraws.

Step 3 covers, automatically and without you asking:

every list on the page and in any pop-up still open — tables, card layouts, simple lists and file lists;
the record card on any record detail screen behind;
calendars and boards, which refresh their events and move their cards themselves;
individual values shown in more than one place. If the record you edited is also referenced elsewhere on the screen, those references are updated in place too.

Deleting is stronger: after a delete, everything refreshes, including the panel you are looking at, the deleted row disappears from every list on screen, and any counter badge next to it is decreased. If deleting empties a pop-up completely, that pop-up closes itself.

Example A ticket list is filtered to "Open". You open ticket 812 in a pop-up, change its status to "Closed" and save. The pop-up closes, a "Record updated." message flashes bottom right, and ticket 812 disappears from the list underneath — because the list re-ran its filter and the ticket no longer matches it.

When The Screen Behind Does Not Refresh

The automatic refresh only reaches the parts of a page that were built to refresh. In practice:

Lists and record cards always refresh. These are the standard screens and they are covered.
Custom-built pages — dashboards, summary pages and other screens your administrator designed by hand — refresh only where your administrator ticked the option to do so, and that option is off by default. A total, a chart or a counter on such a page can therefore keep showing the value it had before you saved.
Only about ten layers are refreshed in one go, counting the page itself. If you have a deeper stack of pop-ups open than that, the deepest ones are left out and keep showing stale values.

This is the single most common "it looks broken but is not". Your data is saved; only the picture on screen is stale.

What to do: use the refresh control on the list or view if there is one, or reload the whole page in your browser. Both show the current data. See Saved Views And Queries for the refresh control, and When Something Goes Wrong if the value is still wrong after a reload.

What to tell your administrator: name the page and the number that did not update, and ask them to turn on the refresh-after-save option for that element.

Save Failures Leave The Pop-Up Open

If a save fails, the pop-up stays open with everything you typed still in it:

Some fields are incorrect. You get a message saying so and the offending fields are marked in red. Nothing else on the screen is refreshed. Fix the fields and save again.
Something went wrong on the server. You get an error message, the record is not saved, and the panel stays open. Copy what you typed somewhere safe before experimenting further.

Field-level validation is covered in Creating And Editing Records.

Links, The Address Bar, Back And Forward

The Address Bar Follows What You Are Looking At

When you open a pop-up, the address in your browser's address bar changes: the page address stays, and a long suffix describing the open panels is added after it. Every panel you stack adds to it, and closing a panel removes it again.

That means you can select the address, copy it, and send it to a colleague — and when they open it, they land on the same page with the same pop-ups open, in the same order.

Three caveats:

Panels are re-opened one at a time when the address is loaded, so a link with several panels takes as long as all of them added together. Any panel that fails or takes more than about ten seconds is skipped silently — your colleague simply sees fewer panels than you did, with no message.
The recipient sees only what their own role allows. A panel they may not open is skipped, or opens on the warning that the record is unreachable and closes itself.
The address bar does not follow every single click. It is rewritten when you use the main navigation and when you open or close a pop-up. Changing a list — sorting, filtering, paging, switching saved view — is picked up as well, but only the next time the address is rewritten. Other in-page links do not change it. So the address you copy describes your page and your open pop-ups, but not necessarily every step you took to get there.

Getting Out Of The Pop-Up To A Plain Page

If what you want is a link to a single record rather than a snapshot of your stacked panels, get to that record as an ordinary full page first:

Hold Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac) while clicking a record link, or middle-click it. This skips the pop-up entirely and opens the record as a full page in a new tab.
Use the "Open on a separate view" action. It is in the right-click menu on a list row, and it also appears in the Actions menu at the top of a record when you are looking at that record inside a pop-up. It takes you to the record as a normal full page.

One small quirk: when "Open on a separate view" is used from the right-click menu on a list, your browser may ask you to confirm resending the form data if you reload the resulting page. Navigate to it again rather than reloading.

How to copy and share the resulting link is covered in Record Detail Screens.

The Back And Forward Buttons

Back closes the topmost pop-up. It does not take you off the page. Keep pressing Back and the panels close one by one, and only then do you leave the page.
Forward re-opens the panel you just closed. It is fetched from the server again, so it comes back with current data — and anything you had typed into it is gone.
Back does not ask about unsaved changes. This is the one closing route with no confirmation at all. If you are half-way through a form in a pop-up, do not press Back — use the close button so the prompt can protect you.
Sorting, filtering or paging a list does not add a Back step, whether that list is on the page or inside a pop-up. Only moving between pages and opening or closing pop-ups do.
If you deleted a record and then press Back, the application knows not to try to re-open it.

Example You open a project, then its client, then the client's billing contact — three panels deep. You press Back three times: the contact closes, then the client, then the project, and you are back on the project list, still filtered to "Active". A fourth Back takes you to whatever page you were on before the list.

If Your Session Expires While A Pop-Up Is Open

Sessions expire, and administrators can force a sign-out. If that happens while you have pop-ups open, your next click — any click that talks to the server — takes the whole browser to the sign-in page.

What that means in practice:

Every open pop-up disappears, and anything unsaved in them is lost with no warning and no prompt.
You see a message on the sign-in page. In an unmodified application it reads "Your login has expired. Please sign in again." or "Please sign in to continue."
After you sign in, the application usually takes you back to what you were trying to reach — but as a normal full page, not as the pop-up you were in. The panels underneath are not restored.

The habit that protects you: save early inside pop-ups, especially on long forms, rather than keeping a half-filled panel open while you do something else.

There is one case that looks similar but is not. If the server itself has a problem, you get a dialog titled "Error When Processing Request" instead, and the pop-up stays open with your typing intact. That dialog ignores Esc and clicks outside it, so dismiss it with its own close button, then try the action again. See When Something Goes Wrong and Signing In.

Opening The Same Thing Twice

A double-click on a row or a link in a list opens two identical pop-ups, stacked on top of each other. Nothing de-duplicates them. The symptom is that closing the record seems to do nothing — you closed the top copy and the identical one underneath is still there. Close it as well.

A single click is always enough. Clicks inside a pop-up are protected: while the panel is fetching something the translucent wait layer covers it, so a second click cannot get through.

Double-clicking the Save button is a different and more serious matter, because it can create the record twice. Click Save once and wait for the confirmation message. See Creating And Editing Records.

Worked Example: Fixing A Customer Address From An Order

An invoice bounced back because the customer's billing address is out of date. You are on the order list.

You find order 2025-0417 in the list and click its title. The order slides in as a pop-up. The order list stays behind, still filtered to "This month".
The order shows Customer: Northgate Supplies as a link. You click it. A second pop-up stacks on top; the order panel slides slightly to the left and its edge stays visible.
The customer panel is narrow and the address block is cramped, so you click the two-arrow button in its top right corner ("Switch to large view"). The panel widens to most of the screen.
You open the Actions menu at the top of the customer and choose Edit. A third pop-up opens with the customer form. You correct the street and the postal code and click Save.
"Record updated." flashes in the bottom right corner. The edit panel closes by itself, leaving you on the customer panel — which has already redrawn and now shows the corrected address.
You close the customer panel with its close button. The order panel is underneath, and the address shown on the order has updated to the new one too — the panels beneath the one you saved in were all refreshed at the moment you saved, not when you closed anything.
You close the order panel. The order list is exactly as you left it — same filter, same page, same scroll position — and the order's customer address column now shows the new address.

If at step 4 you had changed your mind and clicked the close button instead of Save, you would have been asked "By closing this modal you may lose unsaved changes. Continue?" — and confirming would have discarded the correction.

Tips And Gotchas

The page behind is not dimmed but is not clickable. A click there closes the pop-up. If it feels like the page has frozen, that is a pop-up sitting on top of it.
The close button only closes one layer. After a double-click, or when you are several records deep, you may need to close several times.
Esc cancels an in-flight request as well as closing the panel. Avoid it while something is saving.
Browser Back is the one closing route with no unsaved-changes warning.
Nothing warns you about closing the browser tab or reloading the page, even with a half-filled form open in a pop-up.
You can Tab out of a pop-up. Keyboard focus is not locked inside the panel, so repeated Tab presses can walk into the page behind even though you cannot click there. If your typing stops going where you expect, click back inside the panel.
Holding Shift while clicking a link inverts the behavior: a link that would normally open a pop-up navigates the whole page instead, and an ordinary link opens as a pop-up. If you shift-click to select text on a link, expect the page to move.
Custom-built pages behind a pop-up may not refresh after a save. Reload the page if a number looks wrong.
Very deep stacks are a warning sign. Older panels show only a narrow sliver, the refresh after saving stops reaching the deepest ones, and it becomes easy to lose track of which record you are editing. Close down to the level you need.
Confirmation prompts before an action (for example, before a "Send to accounting" button) are plain browser confirmation boxes and only appear when your administrator configured a confirmation text on that action. Canceling one does nothing at all — no request is sent and no message appears.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

"Records of type X are too cramped in the side panel — could they open in the large view by default?"
"On the Y dashboard, the total does not update after I save. Could you turn on the refresh option for that element?"
"I cannot click through to Z from the order screen, but my colleague can — could you check whether my role can open that record type?"
"This action is destructive. Could you add a confirmation prompt to it?"