Currently one can easily accidentally create a new entity simply by clicking in the blank space below the bottom entity in a table view. There is already a + button and shortcut Ctrl-Enter to do this. While it may be an occasional convenience to create new entities this way, far more often I find myself just having to delete nameless, accidentally created ones. If nothing else not creating the entity on-click until text is entered would be a good idea, I think.
3 Likes
You are once again hitting on a very relevant, daily annoyance. And talk about something that is a big problem in Notion! Would love to see this solved, and have it much harder to create Entities. Even in Table View.
That is one reason I put in this request:
If there was a “toast” pop-out everytime something was created, at least you’d be aware of that. Without this, at times I’m not even aware something got created, that later comes back as an annoyance when it’s uncovered!
Great on this again @Oshyan!!
1 Like
Agree. That seems sensible, but just to note that there might be an issue when we have the option for formulas in the Name field - in this case, the entity will get a name even before anything has been typed.
Yes, I just started using Notion seriously again and indeed it occurs there too, arguably even more egregiously. It’s honestly surprising to me sometimes how these seemingly small (i.e. I assume easy to fix) issues remain for so long. In Notion’s case I even see Tables getting created with 2 or so blank records for no good reason? Maybe I’m doing something wrong. (and I digress)
Incidentally I am sort of slowly trickling out my bugs and feature requests here, trying to base it on what pops up most regularly. I have a whole document of things I write down whenever I find something missing or broken while using Fibery, but it would be a bit of a flood if I were to post them all here at once. 
1 Like
It’s a complex problem with no clear solution. On the one hand it should be super easy to create new things, but I do agree that accidental creations should be easily reverted. So far you have to click Enter and then Ctrl+Z to undo the empty row, but it should work with just Ctrl+Z, we will fix this problem.
As for entity creation, we will also think how to make it fast, but less accidental.
3 Likes
I understand, you must balance speed with avoiding accidental data creation (which in turn affects speed!). I would say there can be lots of easy ways to make it more explicitly clear that the user wants to create a new record. Simply clicking into an empty field and not entering any text should not be one of them in my view. But entering text, that’s an easy test, then create a new record.
Or how about a shortcut to create a new record from anywhere, which respects the view currently open and thus auto-fills/filters accordingly. Ctrl-Shift-N or whatever, a dialog pops up, with the Type set to the current View (where possible), but you can select any type, and if you create a new entity with the same type as current view, it will do the same thing as if you created in that filtered table, e.g. automatically set assignee or priority, etc. There are many other options too, of course.
1 Like
This is a great suggestion. Would help me in many cases where I am trying to limit Types by using single-select to effectively create a few “types” within a Type. But I can’t get to that field on Entity creation, which I can do in most other apps, including Notion via their Templates in many cases of entity creation. If the dialog you suggest would pop open even a minimal pre-configured modal, for example with Required Fields (when we hopefully get that feature) to mimimalize how big the “task creation” modal is.
If you could default at least to the open View or Entity, that would make a lot of sense. I’ve noticed ClickUp does exactly this, very useful. ClickUp also has a reduced-size Task Creation modal, which helps solve the problem I’m having of needing to choose the single-select in some of my entities upon creation, but not being able to do that without a bunch of manual steps first.
Good commentary as always!
1 Like
I just ran into this again in a Table view, and worse. I created a new entry using “New Task” in top-right 3-dot menu, it popped me down to the bottom of the list, I named it, then noticed it appeared to have the wrong status. So I went to change that, but accidentally clicked (twice) juuust outside the clickable area of the Status field, ended up accidentally creating 2 new entries. Opened each of those to delete (pop-up view, forgot I could use multi-select). Then discovered that instead of actually creating a new entity originally, I had somehow accidentally renamed an existing entity (which is why it actually had the “wrong” status), and of course I couldn’t revert the name change! I had to make up an approximation of what it was.
I realize this is not an easily, exactly reproducible thing, but I have run into very similar issues before with creating new entities, both accidentally and intentionally. I really find table view interaction around new entities to feel “fragile” and I don’t trust it because of things like this, and that’s a shame.
1 Like
100% support fixing this type of awkward navigation around Fibery, in particular the unintended creation of entities.
One reason I really like “toast” notifications is that when properly implemented, they give you around 5 seconds to undo. Most famous example is “undo sent Email” in Gmail. If you had a toast, you’d know you actually created the entity, and you could in turn simply click “undo” and the unwanted entity would cease to exist! ClickUp and Clubhouse.io do a great job with this and I hope the Fibery team thinks it’s a useful feature, would really love to see it here and I think it would help with solving this issue, and a ton more.
1 Like
Agree! I’d like to see the behavior of creating new entities and editing existing ones in Table view become less confusing and finnicky in general. But toasts would at least make clear what the system thinks happened and give a chance to undo it. It’s kind of shocking that right now you can’t undo an accidental Entity rename from table view!
1 Like
Couldn’t agree more with this!
1 Like
Just wanted to offset all my recent bug and grievance reports by adding a note that this is also a very common and very annoying problem with Airtable.
Toast notifications may not be a good solution in use cases where you are creating many entities back to back, as they would get very spammy. Can you imagine having a toast notification every time you added data to a new row in Excel or Google Sheets?
One possibility is to add a bit of friction to the new entity creating process so that it takes a double click on a new entity field to create a new entity (currently its a single click).
Similar to how you have to double click to launch an application from the Windows desktop. The first click would highlight the “+” button (hinting functionality) and the second click would create the new entity and select that field for input.
2 Likes
Can confirm, me and my users are creating entities by accident far too often and we have quite complex entities, so you still create it in line and then open them and fill the information.
For our setup it would be even much better if +New button would open modal, rather than sending you to end of the table and start to fill informations and still have a need to open modal. The perfomance on that is not great sometimes also.
It would be even better if as an Admin I could select for entity or space, how new items need to be created - via line or via modal. And even more better if I could set up what fields to request from user when they create new, instead of showing them all 30 fields.
4 Likes
This problem is fixed in new Table View
1 Like