The mistake everyone makes with Auto-Binding in Bubble.io

Understanding Auto-Binding in Bubble.io

Here is what a lot of people miss when working with auto-binding in Bubble. Auto-binding is fantastic because it allows you to save data to your database without having to even add a workflow in. Here's an example. This is a repeating group of contacts with a name field and I'm going to change Eve to Adam. And then just by clicking out of the repeating group, you see the Bubble loading bar go across the top of the page and that means it's saved. If I refresh the page, we can see now that the first entry is called Adam.

Common Frustrations with Auto-Binding

But this is where I see a lot of people spending hours getting frustrated with auto-binding in Bubble. And that is that auto-binding can only look one level up to identify the data that is binding to. So in this instance, we have a repeating group and then this represents one cell. And so our input is related directly to the cell. So it is auto-binding to parents elements thing name.

Potential Issues with Auto-Binding

Now what an easy way that this can just get confusing and it can cause a headache is if we just change a few things. So instead of container fix because that leads to all sorts of design and responsive issues, I'm going to say make it a row. And then because I might want to put more than one element in here and I want to be able to give uniform padding, I've got this group now. So this group is in the cell and I'll make this 100% width. And just to illustrate what I mean by putting in a bit of padding, can really help with that.

Ensuring Proper Data Binding

Right, now this group is of data type contacts, current cells contacts. So we've got our repeating group, we've got our single cell and the data source that we're auto-binding to is being passed all the way down to the input. Now if I've built that in a slightly different way, I might've ended up with this. Which is that now the parent element doesn't have any data in it. Remember auto-binding will only bind to the data contained in the parent.

Troubleshooting Auto-Binding Issues

So let's try that. We're going to get some sort of error or it's not going to work. In fact, it's not even putting the data through. So to correct it, I make sure that my parents, that my input is in, has, and you can fetch this from like going up the elements tree or you can link directly to another source of data. But we just have to make sure that the parent element for our input that we're using to auto bind has got the data in it. Let's refresh. And we're back to it working.

The Importance of Understanding Auto-Binding

So there you have it really quick, but this is something that I've noticed in the Bubble coaching that I do where I help people one to one with their Bubble issues and to accelerate their app development. This is something that just gets people stuck because you just need to know that it's there. So that's why I've created this video.

Explore More Bubble.io Resources

We have even more videos on our website. You can head over to planetno-code.com where we've got videos exclusive for our members. And also you can learn more about Bubble coaching where you can get one to one support with someone like myself. And yeah, we can help you accelerate and build your SaaS app, build the web app of your dreams.