Best Practices for Performant Views

To ensure your Views load their data quickly, especially as your app continues to grow over time, it’s important to design Views with performance in mind.

This article details the main factors that impact View performance, and best practices to follow to keep your Views performing efficiently.

🎓Summary of Performance Tips

Avoid Using Default Views

Default Views include every field from a Table, which can quickly lead to performance issues, particularly with larger datasets.

🥇Best Practice:
Create custom Views that include only the necessary fields that are relevant to the View’s purpose. Limiting the number of fields in a View minimizes the data being processed and displayed, leading to quicker load times.

For more information on creating Custom Views, check out the resources below: 

🎓Help Center article: How to Create Views
🎓TrackVia University: Views Course

Use View Filters to Limit the Number of Records Displayed

Views that display all records in a Table can take much longer to load, especially if the Table contains many records.

🥇Best Practice:
Apply View Filters to restrict the number of records displayed in the View. For example, filter by:

• Status (e.g., “Open” or “In Progress”)
• Assigned user
• Date range

This keeps Views responsive and makes it easier for users to find what they need.

For more information on View Filters, check out the resource below: 

🎓Help Center article: How to Create a Filter

Limit the Number of Calculated Fields in Views

Each time a user loads a View containing Calculated fields, those Calculated fields run their logic in real-time. If your View includes many records and several Calculated fields, performance can suffer.

🥇Best Practice:
First, consider whether you can use a Triggered field instead of a Calculated field.

Unlike Calculated fields that will run calculations for every record in the View each time the View is loaded, Triggered fields only run their calculations when triggered by a record event (e.g. when a record is updated), and changes are only applied to the specific records that were updated rather than every record in the View.

🥇Second, only include essential Calculated fields in Views.

For more information on Calculated and Triggered fields, check out the resources below: 

🎓Help Center Article: Triggered Fields vs. Calculated Fields
🎓TrackVia University: Functions and Formulas Course

Understand and Stay Within the Join Limit

TrackVia has a join limit that impacts how many relationships a Table or View can include.

What Is a Join?

A join is created any time a field references data from a source outside the current Table. This includes:

• Dropdown Fields: Reference another Table to display selectable values.
• Application User Fields: Pull from the "Manage Users" Table.
• User Group Fields: Pull from the account-level user group list.
• Image and Document Fields: Store uploaded files in a separate location.
• Relationship fields
• *Calculated & Triggered fields – these field types don’t count towards the join limit by default, but if their formulas reference any of the field types listed above, then it will count towards the join limit. It’s important to be aware of this, as more complex formulas referencing many fields, or formulas that reference other Calculated fields can increase the number of joins exponentially.

Join Limit Details

• A single Table, View, or Form can contain no more than 58 joins. This limit can be reached surprisingly quickly due to poor app architecture, or overuse of field types that count towards the join limit.
• Once this limit is exceeded, affected Views or Forms will fail to load and display an  error message.
• The only solution is to remove or reduce the number of joins.

🥇Best Practice:

To avoid hitting the join limit:

• Break large Tables into smaller, purpose-driven Tables.
• Eliminate unused or redundant join-based fields (e.g. remove unnecessary drop down fields).
• Be cognizant of Calculated field formulas that reference fields that count towards the join limit, as well as chaining Calculated field formulas.

For more information on the Join Limit, check out the resource below: 

🎓TrackVia University: Tables Course