Using Simple Q&A Diary you may want to create a bunch of entries in one take. For example you may want to make three entries every day, each belonging to a different category, like Personal/Work/Health.
It would be tiresome if you had to create one entry, then go back to the list of entries, hit the plus button, select another category and do it several times in a row.
So, just for this case I have added a Next button to the answer editing screen:
Once you have filled in your answers for the first entry, tap the Next button and you are in the second entry and so on. The order in which the entries of different categories appear is determined by the order of your templates in the list of templates.
You may find that this Next button isn’t shown all the time. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. This may be confusing and needs an explanation. First of all the Next button is never shown for the existing entries. Also it is not shown if the current category corresponds to the last template in the template list (there is simply no next category). And the third case is when the entry of the next category would be an already existing entry.
Let’s look at this example
Suppose you have templates with these names and in this order in your templates list:
- Category 1
- Category 2
- Category 3
- Category 4
- Category 5
You can create an entry of Category 1 for today’s date. By tapping Next button you can go to Category 2, then to Category 3 and so on till Category 5, at which point the Next button will disappear.
Or, you can start with, say, Category 3 and go to Category 4 and then to Category 5.
What if you already had a today’s entry for Category 3? In this case, if you start with Category 1, you can go to Category 2, but that will be it: the Next button will disappear in Category 2’s screen.
The rule is: you don’t use Next button for browsing your entries (you don’t need to browse them in editing screens anyway, since all your entries are perfectly visible in your main list of entries). You use it only for creating a series of entries in one take.
There is a reason I did it this way. If the Next button was shown all the time it would be tempting to use it for browsing existing entries. But the order in which you go from category to category using the Next button is determined by your templates list. And this order may differ drastically from the order of the existing entries in a specific day record. You would feel like by hitting the Next button you should end up in the next category you just saw in your existing entry but instead you would end up in some completely different category determined by you templates list.
I tried it. And it was too confusing even for me, given that I know what’s going on inside my app. I imagine that for the users it would seem like there is a bug in the app or something. So I had to add this restriction on the Next button.
It may seem complicated as I explain it, but, really, you don’t have to think too much about it. If you just make a bunch of entries every day, the Next button will always be there.
