Feed Label to Spreadsheet Instead of Key?

mykrobinson · 02-16-2022 07:46 AM

Looks like these questions are going to be daily while I work my way through learning this...

I am working towards proper data normalization and trying to create repositories of common data that may potentially be used in a few internal applications. I am testing a form to input some non-sensitive patient information, with the primary objective being to assist the doctors by making their rounding more efficient and eliminate the need to carry around a bunch of papers. This should also help keep the most current information as to where they should be at their fingertips as information is updated by other entities.

Anyways, my current problem today is the hospital selection. I have a Facilities spreadsheet that has a Hospitals page containing the information on a few hospitals. The Patients table has a Hospital field, and the user is presented with a dropdown box that pulls values from the Hospitals table. To my understanding, I needed to use the Valid If option to target the ID of the hospitals, with the label data being returned to the dropdown fields.

This part works fine, but what is being written back to the spreadsheet is the ID instead of the label. What have i done wrong today?

Side note, thank you all for being so kind and welcoming with my rookie questions thus far.

Suvrutt_Gurjar

You have not done anything wrong. You are on correct path. The reference column will display label name in the dropdown selection but will store the parent key in the backend table.

Please use dereference expression of [Hospital].[Hospital Name Label Column in Hospital-Locations table] in the Patients table with a new column name such as [Hospital Name] added in the Patients table to pull the name of the hospital from the Hospital_locations table.

https://help.appsheet.com/en/articles/1090811-dereference-expressions

mykrobinson

thank you. For whatever reason, I am having trouble targeting the desired column, presumably due to synatx?

Suvrutt_Gurjar

Please create this expression in the child table Patients by adding a new column called say Hospital Name

This column will capture the Hospital name in the child table "Patients" , so this column needs to be in the Patients table.

mykrobinson

That's what i did. Turns out the expression assistant complains but it still actually works 🤔. Strange.

Thank you for the assistance. Any explanation as to why the expression assistant barked at me?