Tables

Tables in the top bar is where you find a table to open. It holds three sections — the tables you have worked on, everything anyone has published, and the tables people have shared with you — and clicking a row opens it.

The page runs no table itself, so it opens immediately and stays useful while something else is going on elsewhere.

The three sections

Each section loads on its own, the first time you open it — an unopened tab costs nothing, and coming back to one you have already opened does not fetch it again. One section failing says nothing about the others.

Recent: this browser, plus your account

Recent is the only section that has two sources, and which you get depends on whether you are signed in:

• Signed out it lists the tables saved in this browser. That is the whole story for a visitor who has never signed in — not an error, and not an empty library.
• Signed in it lists those and the tables on your account, merged into one list. A table that exists in both places appears once, as your account’s copy.

Each row says which it is, because the two dates mean different things: Updated is your account’s stamp, Saved is this browser’s own autosave. A row also shows its stored size when that is known — your account knows it, this browser does not.

Opening a table

Where a row came from decides what you get:

• A Recent row opens your table the normal way, editable, with everything you save going back to it.

• A Public or Shared with you row opens as a read-only preview. Someone else’s table is not yours to overwrite, so the session is walled off from your own storage: the table loads and you can look around and move things, but nothing is kept. The page says so while you are in one:

  You are viewing a shared table. Edits here are NOT saved — reloading discards them. Save a copy to keep it as your own table.

  Save a copy is the way out. It claims the table as your own under a new name of its own, so nothing you already have is touched — you keep every table you had and gain one, and it turns up in Recent from then on. Editing persists normally from that point.

Version badges on a row

A table file carries the version of showcade that wrote it, and a row is badged when that is newer than the showcade you are running:

The badge is on the row deliberately — it is the answer before the click rather than after a load that fails.

Signed out

Public works signed out, and so does Recent (as this browser’s tables).

Shared with you is the one section that cannot: a table is shared with a verified address, so with no session there is no address to ask about. The tab does not fail and does not claim to be empty — it makes no request at all and says:

Sign in to see tables people have shared with you.

Sign in from the top bar and it starts working. Signing out again, or switching accounts, clears what the previous account could see.

When a section will not load

A section that fails says what failed and offers Try again, and only that section is affected — a broken shared inbox never makes Public look empty.

Recent’s two halves are reported separately for the same reason. If your account is unreachable but this browser’s tables load, you get the rows that did load with the failure noted beside them, rather than an empty list.

Where there is more to fetch, Load more continues from where the list left off.

Related

• Object Editor — edit the table you opened
• Playing the Table — the keyboard controls for driving it
• Asset Catalog — the models, images, and audio a table draws on