Tons of additional Spacer Tiles are being added to Dashboards

[Glenn_Goodman]

I’m getting tons of extra Spacer tiles added to my Dashboards ever time I edit them. Even if there is nothing following the Spacer tiles.

Is this a bug?
How do I remove them? Is there a way to remove more than one tile at a time?

Thanks!

[Tommy]

It would be really nice to delete more than 1 at a time.
Is there a way to edit more than 1 tile at a time? If I wanted to change all the colors of tiles for instance.

[James]

@Glenn_Goodman can you please take a screenshot/video of your dashboard and send it to support@sharptools.io so we can understand how it injects the spacer every time you edit it?

The system will automatically inject spacers up to the last tile on the dashboard. When dragging things around or adding new tiles this may leave extra tiles at the end of your dashboard. If there are extra spacer tiles at the end of your dashboard before saving, you can remove those tiles before saving and it will prevent extra spacers from being injected. Here’s a video demonstrating the Spacer injection:

SharpTools Spacers

@Glenn_Goodman & @Tommy, you can send your dashboard id to support@sharptools.io that we can help remove the extra spacer tiles for you. Meanwhile, we also have it on our short list to improve the logic around Spacer Tile injection.

@Tommy, you can change the color at the dashboard level (see screenshot below), which will change every tile’s color unless the tile’s was overridden at tile level. Ex: I usually set the tiles’ colors at the dashboard level, and only change those contact/door/leak sensor’s active color to red, so I can customize those important tiles’ color but keep most to follow whatever I set in dashboard level.

[Tommy]

@James I sent in the video of what I’m talking about.

As it relates to mass tile color changes. Sorry, I had forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder.

[CJ_Resener]

I also have about 15-20 rows of spacer tiles that were added below my dashboard. It’s quite annoying as when I go to add a new tile, it goes all the way to the bottom and I have to drag it up to the top of the screen, scroll up, drag it up, scroll up, etc.

[josh]

@Glenn_Goodman @Tommy @CJ_Resener be sure to check out our latest beta which has a number of improvements around Spacer injection and deletion. Here’s a link to the thread in the beta category:

https://community.sharptools.io/t/instant-switches-and-spacer-improvements/1932?u=josh

Please give it a try and provide your feedback in the linked thread!

All three of you have access to the beta, but if anyone else is interested check out the Beta Access post

[CJ_Resener]

Just checked it out and it removed all my excess tiles! Awesome! I like the instant tile click too!

[Jason_Gabler]

[edit]
OK, I have come to realize that if you have a ton of spacers but the very last tile in your configuration is not a spacer, the spacer deletion popup will not show. I suppose your algorithm for detecting excess spacers contains logic looking for trailing spacers at the end of the bottom-most, right-most space. I moved that last tile and saved, and then popup came up.

I wish there was a way to lock the width of the dashboard to a number of tiles. This would make the dashboard much easier to edit, especially within a lap/desktop browser.
[/edit]

I could’ve sworn I had seen the ability to remove spacer tiles en masse in production when I first started using SharpTools earlier last year. In the past few weeks I’ve been seeing once again explosions of spacer tiles when try to edit using my Samsung Tab A to edit. Usually, it begins slowly and I find myself unable to place tiles where I want and start seeing tiles on top of one another. Then, suddenly, every move brings in half a dozen spacers or more. And, now as I said, I see no way to remove them other than one by one. If this feature is now in production, I do not see it.

This is just 1/3 of them

[James]

@Jason_Gabler

I suppose your algorithm for detecting excess spacers contains logic looking for trailing spacers at the end of the bottom-most, right-most space.

That’s right. If you have any extra spacer tile after the “real” tile, it will prompt and remove all the extra ones if you’d like to. Since there’s no way to know if a spacer is placed on purposed for the layout design or added accidentally if it is among the real tiles. The fixed canvas layout design is indeed in our list, so you feedback is greatly appreciated.

Meanwhile, you may want to try the following trick for editing tablet/mobile dashboard on a PC/laptop browser.

How To: Designing Dashboards for a Tablet from a Laptop / PC

@Devin_Morell thanks for posting! The tiles on SharpTools dashboards will automatically reflow based on the screen width. If you’re looking to have tiles line up a certain way on a certain device, we recommend designing the dashboard for your target device size. For anyone who is finding this via search, the feedback in this post applies to the legacy Reflowing Dashboards. Creating a new dashboard will default to using Scalable Dashboards making it easier to use the same dashboard …

And @Stan_Silverman also shared his trick of using “Window Resizer”, a chrome extension, which allows you to change your browser resolution to your table with just one click, and makes editing tablet dashboard on a PC/laptop easier.