When you select a row from a table view or you edit a row, you are not taken to a top-level view that is accessible in either the menu or the buttons at the bottom of your app. Instead, you are taken to a reference view (or ref view for short). A ref view is a hidden view that is only used when drilling down into your data, editing or adding data, or displaying a row using a Ref column.
Get started with a sample app
The Activity schedule sample app provides a simple example of reference views. The Notes user-defined reference view and its associated system-generated views (Notes_Detail, Notes_Form, and Notes_Inline), shown in the following figure, enable users to view or add notes to a student's activity details.
The following figure shows how the views are displayed and accessed in the app.
User-defined reference views
You can also explicitly define ref views by creating a new view and setting its position to ref when configuring view details. Any user-defined ref view takes precedence over system-defined ref views. You can create ref views based on tables or slices. The ref view configuration will be used whenever the data source of the ref view matches that of the view you are starting from.
System-generated reference views
The system automatically generates ref views for each of the tables in the app. For example, a table called Students will have a Students_Detail view. If the table allows adds or edits, there will also be a Students_Form view. If the table can be shown inline because it has a reference to another table, it will also have a Students_Inline view.
You can modify the system-generated views to easily change the look and feel of the app. See Views: The Essentials.