What is 'listing mode' for Profiles?

Question

Wordpress and civicrm 5.4

I've created a profile to allow our members to update some of their contact info.

It displays nicely in edit mode and if a member updates a field all is good and I get a nice success message.

If the user chooses not to update and presses the cancel button the page (I think) attempts to display the form in listings mode and I get an error message;

No fields in this Profile have been configured as searchable. Ask the site administrator to check the Profile setup.

The same error message is displayed if a field is changed and the "Back to Listing" button which appears at the bottom of the confirmation page is used.

a few questions: 1. What exactly is 'listing mode'? Do i understand correctly that is a publicly available / searchable page?
2. I'm guessing to avoid above error I need to configure at least some fields as searchable in the Profile set up? But I have tried making some fields searchable and the error perists. Have I misunderstood? 3. If I do succeed in making feilds searchable and thus presumably removing the error - who are the fields visible to exactly?

Answer 1

Listing mode in profile enables the user to do a follow up search for other records which also have that same field value.

For example, you might set City to Public Pages and Listings. After the user conducts a search and views the details for a record they can search on the city value and look for other field values present in the record.

FWIW, If you don't want to navigate the user to listing page on hitting the cancel button, you can add a custom URL for this button in profile settings. It also provides a flexibility to simply remove the cancel button from profile.

The above config is present in Advanced Settings pane in the profile settings form.