When working with a data source you've imported into Frontly—whether it’s from Google Sheets, Airtable, or Supabase, you can easily configure a variety of settings to tailor your data to your app's needs. By clicking into the data source, you’ll find three main settings: Basics, Fields, and Hidden Filters. Each of these sections offers settings to better plan and customize your data, ensuring that your data display blocks and form blocks are set up optimally for your users.

The Basics section allows you to assign a simple title to your data source, helping you differentiate it from others. This title is for internal use and is useful for organizing multiple data sources within your app.
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Another key setting in this section is Allow Public Access. Enabling this feature makes the data source viewable on public Frontly pages. Note, this setting will NOT grant users direct access to your database, but instead, allows this data to be displayed on any page that does not require your users to login.

To find this page setting, head over to the desired page, click More and click the 'Require Login' toggle.

The Fields section allows you to customize the order in which fields appear by setting a default field order, which is particularly useful when displaying data in tables or forms. You can also define the data types for each field, choosing between Text, Integer, Float, Date, or True/False, depending on the nature of your data. Each data type corresponds to specific UI components that control how the data is presented.

Additionally, if you're working with a text field, you have the option to use the select UI component, where you can preload a set of options for dropdowns or multi-select lists. This allows users to choose from predefined values, streamlining the data input process.

The 'Refresh Fields' button will update any changes you've made to your fields and their values from within the data source with a few additional settings you can toggle.
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​Auto Detect Types is a process that will simply run through your field headers and data and approximate it to any of the data types and their UI components available. This will overwrite any pre-existing setting before, but can be manually updated after.

Disable New Fields will prevent any net new fields that have been added to the data source from suddenly appearing in your blocks. This includes net new fields that have been added to a dataset through a data relation as well, which will save you the effort of needing to hide these new fields across your app.

The 'Hidden Filters' section allows you to set predefined filters at the data source level, ensuring that certain conditions are always applied whenever the data is accessed. This feature is particularly useful if you consistently need to filter your data in the same way across different blocks. By setting hidden filters here, you eliminate the need to manually configure the same filters in each block, saving time and reducing the chance of errors. This will provide a more efficient and streamlined data management experience!

Click here for all the information you need on Hidden Filters