Modern List Item UI Causes Data Loss

[anneoday]

I feel like I may be missing something simple but I'm about to tear my hair out because I keep running into this and it is so irritating!

I'm working in SharePoint Online using the modern experience, and I have a custom list with 15 fields.  That's not a tremendous amount as lists go, but it can take some time to fill out a single entry.  

As I'm working in the "New Item" pop-out box, things generally seem to go along fine as long as I'm super careful never to move my mouse off that box.  But if I click anywhere outside the dialog window, all my data is just gone, vanishes, poof, not saved.  I've tried looking for it with Alt+Tab and Task Manager but no, that dialog is just gone.  

I've been experiencing this in IE and Chrome, not tried Firefox yet.  Surely I'm not the only one experiencing this?  

[#2]

Yeah, same issue here. I don't know of a way around it either and had the same problem once.

[#3]

Tagging here @Chris McNulty

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Ideally, if it was possible. An event that when that screen closes you get a prompt to save your changes, or at least some way when you click new again the previous box showed back up where you left off.

[#5]

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@Deleted wrote:
Ideally, if it was possible. An event that when that screen closes you get a prompt to save your changes, or at least some way when you click new again the previous box showed back up where you left off.

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This description fits what I would expect, thanks @Deleted!

My workaround is to fill in the required fields, save, and go back in to edit, essentially filling out a few fields at a time and saving as I go. But that's a waste of time and I still occasionally do the accidental slip of the mouse.  

I guess that brings up the point that the Edit Item pop-up box behaves the same way, not just the New item.  

[#6]

I’ve experienced the same issue while doing a final testing of a solution with my customer end users. 3 of them lost their data. I felt very unprofessional and I could not beleive a major issue like this has not been captured by Microsoft. Also with the edit screen you get when clicking on the info icon, each field being updated will generate a new version. This is really bad with documents under regulation like ISO.

[#7]

The best workaround I've found is to go back to classic mode, but I have a feeling that's not going to be allowed for much longer. 

[#8]

It'll be around for years. They will iron this out before classic goes away.

Another alternative could be just fire up powerapp form for the list and have that input the data.

[#9]

I've tried with PowerApps (replace the new/edit form) and it is the same issue. PowerApps launch in the same panel on the right. If you click outside, everything goes away.... It would be so easy to fix if I could override the New action in the list ribbon to call newform.aspx (In my case it is a list). This is launching in it's own full window using modern experience. Same thing if I could override the Open & Edit items from the EditControlBlock menu to call editform.aspx ?ID=... . I don't want to add custom actions in the EditControlBlock and CommandUI.Ribbon because it will be confusing for the end users having additional actions to create or edit items.

Any idea if we can change the calls of New, Open, Edit? From what I can see I can only add new custom action with PnP (not override). Can it be the with the Framework?

Thanks,

Martin.

[#10]

Yeah your right I forgot about that, been awhile since I loaded it up.

[#11]

If modern experience could support the "Launch in a dialog" advanced option where if enabled, this would behave as it is right now, and if not, it would redirect to the full window form... I can't understand why this would be so hard to implement... I see this issue as a major failure for the modern experience (with the document sets still not supported in modern UI). Switching to classic make you loose some very useful features... This is a nightmare for a consultant trying to provide guidance to his customers... I hope @Chris McNulty could give us some feedback on this issue.

[#12]

Yeah I kind of agree, should be something easy to fix that needs some quick fixin. Specially how easy it is to click off of that on accident, and if you have a big form, that could be upsetting.

[#13]

@anneoday and @Deleted Chris McNulty confirmed in SharePoint Fest DC a few weeks ago there are 0 plans to retire the classic UI until all gaps are accounted for.... and right now that list is quite long.  Not to say that position won't change, but it makes sense for the time being.

[#14]

Yeah this is a super annoying issue. As a user, I expected the 'unsaved' data to still be on the new form when I click 'new' again, but it was all blanked out. This needs to be addressed.

[#15]

I've tested again PowerApps and it caches the info (in my first test I think I've concluded to fast and only notice the panel was closing) if we click outside the panel. So using PowerApps custom forms is a potential solution.

Note: It caches info for new and edit forms.

Martin.

[#16]

I've got a similar issue with one customer, where they edit a list item - changing 2 values, but the item is actually updated twice - so a SharePoint Designer workflow runs twice, resulting in a duplicate email notification. They only noticed it when they moved from Classic to Modern.

[#17]

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@Rob Ellis wrote:
I've got a similar issue with one customer, where they edit a list item - changing 2 values, but the item is actually updated twice - so a SharePoint Designer workflow runs twice, resulting in a duplicate email notification. They only noticed it when they moved from Classic to Modern.

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I think I've heard of that ... does using the "edit all" button help?  It opens all the fields at once, still in the modern experience but instead of doing cell by cell updates, it behaves more like the classic form.

[#18]

@anneoday - Thanks!  That was exactly what we needed.

[#19]

Hi Rob, you are referring updating metadata using the information panel (not the Edit All form) where each field update generate a save? Yes, this is a nonsense especially for workflow/flow and also versioning (it generates new versions on each column that is saved). They should only provide the edit form (Edit All) option… But like @Anne O'Day says, when you edit with the edit form (or newform) , you need to be carefull not clicking outside the form or you will loose your updates (form will close).

Martin.

[#20]

Glad to hear it!  I'm assuming this "edit all" is still considered the modern experience because it looks like it visually and there's still a "return to classic" in lower left.  FYI that you can get to it directly with the same URL build as older versions of SharePoint, like this:

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename/Lists/mylist/EditForm.aspx?ID=10

(I like to build a view that includes the ID column, export it, then build a hyperlink column so that I can filter/sort my data very quickly and go in for single item edits much faster than with the SharePoint GUI.)