CollabPortals

Summary Fields and Record Detail

Pick which fields appear on the row or card and which ones live on the dedicated record detail page. Applies to every view type.

Overview

Every record in a portal has two surfaces:

  1. A summary that shows in the table row, gallery card, kanban card, or calendar entry.
  2. A detail page that opens when the end user clicks the record.

You decide which viewable fields appear on the summary and which only appear on the detail page. The rest of the configuration, field permissions and required fields, still applies as normal.

This is the single most useful setting on wide tables. A table with 100 fields is unreadable as a row, but five well-chosen summary fields make it scannable, and the detail page handles the rest.

Configuring Summary Fields

  1. 1

    Open the Display tab

    In the portal admin, open the role, expand the table, and switch to the Display tab.

  2. 2

    Pick the summary fields

    The control underneath the view type dropdown changes name depending on the view:

    • Table: "Columns shown in the table"
    • Gallery / Kanban / Calendar: "Fields shown on the card"

    Check the fields you want on the summary. Uncheck the rest. Unchecked fields still appear on the detail page when a user clicks the record. Changes save with the rest of the portal configuration.

Field Order

Picking fields here chooses which ones the view shows, not the order they appear in. That comes from the one field order you arrange by dragging on the field permissions list, and it applies everywhere in the portal, so a field sits in the same place on the table, on a card and on the record detail page.

Defaults

When you first switch a table to a non-table view, CollabPortals picks up to three fields automatically as the card body, skipping the primary field, the cover field (gallery), the group field (kanban), and the date field (calendar). For the table view, every viewable field is shown until you customise the list.

You can always change the selection later.

Reserved Fields

A few fields are reserved by the view itself, so you can't add them to the card body. The view already uses them structurally:

  • The primary field is always shown as the card title.
  • The cover field (gallery) shows as the card image.
  • The group field (kanban) determines which column the card sits in. It is not duplicated on the card.
  • The date field (calendar) determines where the record is placed on the calendar. It is not duplicated on the card.

These fields appear in the picker with a small note explaining what they're being used for. You don't need to add them to the summary fields list, and you can't deselect them either.

Empty Fields on the Detail Page

The detail page lists every field the role can view, and prints a dash where a field has no value. On a table of mostly-optional columns that leaves most of the page reading as dashes.

The Record Detail section on the same Display tab has one switch, Hide empty fields on the record page, that leaves those fields out instead. It is off by default.

  • Turn it on for a table with many optional columns, where a record typically fills in a handful of them. A yarn catalog with a percentage column per fiber type is the case it was built for: one row per fiber the product actually contains, rather than twenty dashes.
  • Leave it off where an empty field is worth showing. The dash tells the end user the field exists and nobody has filled it in yet, which is what you want on a form-shaped portal.

A number that is 0 is a real value, so it is never treated as empty. Blank or whitespace-only text, an empty date, and a link or attachment field with nothing in it are.

With the switch on, a record that has nothing in any of the fields that would show here gets the line "Empty fields are hidden on this page." instead of a blank space under the heading. Related tabs and the record's name are unaffected, so they still show.

The switch only changes what the page shows. The field stays viewable, it stays editable in the edit form, and its row comes back on its own the moment someone fills the cell in. To remove a field for good, set it to Hidden in field permissions.

It applies per table and per role, and it covers the record detail page and the end user's own profile page. No list view is affected: a table, gallery, kanban or calendar lays a record out as a row or a card, and an FAQ shows only its question and answer, so an empty cell costs no space of its own in any of them and there is nothing for the switch to drop.

Interaction with Field Permissions

Summary fields are a strict subset of viewable fields. A field set to Hidden in field permissions never appears, not on the summary, not on the detail page. Hiding a field is the way to remove it entirely; unchecking it on the summary keeps it available on the detail page.

Tips

  • Start with five or six summary fields. End users can scan a list with five columns. A list with thirty is overwhelming.
  • Pick fields that disambiguate records. Status, owner, date, location. Anything that helps a user pick the right record to click into.
  • Push long text and rarely-read fields to the detail page. Description, notes, attachments, multi-line content.
  • Per role. Each role has its own summary field selection. A staff view and a client view can summarise the same table differently.

Next Steps

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