Incomplete sets of related records are displayed when subform views are formatted as grids

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We are running Sp. v7.9.6.1.

In our collection DB, we have our collecting event table form set to display related collection objects in a panel as a grid. I noticed a while ago that when there are more than 20 collection objects related to a record, there appears to be no way to view the additional objects aside from switching the record from a grid to a subform view. For example, see page for collecting event OSUM:1964:0069.

Screenshot 2025-01-22 at 2.06.40 PM
Screenshot 2025-01-22 at 2.06.40 PM1610Ă—2188 485 KB

Notably, the CE form displays the proper number of related records (40) has no issue properly displaying all related records when the view type is set to “subform” but having COs displayed as subforms isn’t ideal because one of the main reasons we dispplay the linked COs is to be able to see the diversity of specimens collected at a site at a glance, with no clicking/tabbing, and to be able to access the related records with a single click without querying for them. Designing the form in this way is a workaround in order to display relationship data that should be handled by a “display related records” function, as mentioned in this thread.

I suspect that this has something to do with the maximum height of the subpanel in our view definition, or the maximum height of a form in user preferences, but I haven’t been able to find a change that fixes this satisfactorily. Having an extra-long form would be better than not having related records appear on a form at all.

This issue is also somewhat related to Github issue 5326 (and this related forum post) because linked CO records in grid view on the CE form also cannot be sorted properly using many of the header columns of read-only fields, which exacerbates the issue of not being able to see all linked records at once.

The ideal setup for us would be to have a display option that was a hybrid between subform and grid, where batches of 10-20 records in grid view could be seen, so that the user can decide whether or not they want to see additional linked records and page load times are not adversely impacted by opening CEs with many linked COs. But in the short term, a fix that would display all related lots would be much appreciated, if anyone has any ideas!

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This issue (#5298) has already been fixed in the upcoming Specify v7.10 release! The issue is that Specify fetches query results in chunks of 20. As of v7.9.6.2, this fetch occurs only once when loading items in a grid. When displaying items in a subform, it retrieves the total count of all items but only fetches information from the records in that subform one at a time when navigated to.

This issue will fortunately no longer occur after the next update is released.

We appreciate your interest in resolving this issue and have made a note of it for the development team!

The ideal setup for us would be to have a display option that was a hybrid between subform and grid, where batches of 10-20 records in grid view could be seen, so that the user can decide whether or not they want to see additional linked records and page load times are not adversely impacted by opening CEs with many linked COs.

I’ve added this as a feature request on our GitHub: #6140

I think that’s a great idea and would provide you with the best of both worlds. Loading over 40 items in a subview at once may not be desirable in many cases, so that flexibility would be great to have!

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great to hear!

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