Thanks you for this unexpected confidence !! First, I don't have a single app with 2000 users, so my cases can be different than yours. But FWIW, here's my journey trying to figure out what is happening with users and how to avoid getting into problems from the first place.
At the beginning I tried hard to decipher the audit logs to gain more insight about what could be causing those intermittent, inconsistent, problems users were reporting. Eventually reaching a dead-end, I came to enlightenment ๐
I figured out that more important than understanding the nonsensical logs (and support feedback), was to understand user behavior that leads to the manifestation of these problems. So in a moment of post-frustration determination I decided to build my own logging mechanism. Not only adds/updates/deletes, but I replaced every action in the app, even clicking on a view, clicking on a record to navigate to details view, viewing a reference record, everything, with a preceding step of logging of the interaction, username, timestamp, location and any other relevant info I would need. This logging I could turn ON or OFF with a single parameter for the whole app.
I might not have been successful in understanding why AppSheet was not behaving the way it should, but with this logging I came to know exactly when a particular problem would appear and was even able to reproduce it. I adopted my design practices to avoid falling victims of such bugs/shortcoming, was able to solve the problem for the customer, and had more time to argue with support till they acknowledge a bug or a need of improvement.
Anyway, here are the lessons learnt that translated into practices:
- Bot triggers are un reliable. I have only one type of trigger, that is an increment of a specific counter. If I want to trigger based on addition of a row, I increment a certain counter, if I want to trigger based on a deletion, then I increment another. This is the trigger that I found the most reliable of all, so I only use it.
- As can be inferred, from the first point, I don't allow users to directly delete rows for examples, I replace the delete action with another that would increment a counter and leave a bot delete the row.
- Also for edits, if multiple users are susceptible to edit the same row, I never allow them to edit the row directly, instead, I built a change-request model to register individual user changes, then manage these requests into edits through a bot.
- I now never, ever, launch multi-step actions from the user's device (like a form save action for example). Instead, again, I'll let the user increment a certain hidden counter, then let the bot do the work.
- For certain customers I have in Africa and Latin America, due to unstable mobile network, I try to keep the sync requests as small as possible, say instead of having to do one sync operation to update 10 rows, I divide it so that we have 10 syncs each for one row.
- I have a lot of controls to prevent simultaneous editing. For example, suppose that I want to update a customer account and transaction history following a new purchase, and for this I have to do a list of say 10 changes. I make sure no one is able to do any modification of any record related to this customer until the registering of these 10 changes in the database is complete. So in my bot that is triggered by a counter, I add a step in the beginning to set a syncFlag in the customer's row to False, then the bot execute all the steps, then at the end I have the same flag reset to true by the bot. All records referencing this customer in all other tables cannot be edited while the flag is set to false, all action buttons that would cause an edit to a record related to this customer will only be shown to users upon the condition of [customerKey].[syncFlag].
- Without writing the whole list, I don't rely on what the app should do, I rather explicitly do what it should. For example, I don't rely on "is part of', my bot explicitly deletes related referencing records. I've manually added explicit spacing between the items of this numbered list ๐
This is what I could remember, I will add more points of I remember more. I hope this helps.
LinkedIn
Twitter
