Handling arrays in Appsheet

[mr_ravi]

Hi I'm really new to Appsheet and one of the big questions I have is how to handle large, dynamic lists of data. For example the type of data you may store in an array or JSON.

For example I have a Googlesheet which I use for data. I want to save a House. Then against each House I will record Rooms. Then against each Room I will record Items. Then for each Item we have some standard data (such as Item name, image, condition). So you can see that a House can quickly end up with 100's of Items.

What is the most efficient way to store this much data? As well as Items, a House may have lots of other info against so the sheet is likely to get big quite quickly. In future I'd want to hook it up to Supabase or something like that, but as I'm just learning what do you recommend?

[Hussein_Osseily]

Am not fully experienced here but from what i see is similar to parent records, child records, grandchild records, ... 
Referencing and creating relations with tables doesnt work for you ? 
Parent:

ID

House

Child:

ID

House

Rooms

Grandchild:

ID

House

Rooms

Items

And so on

[mr_ravi]

I don't fully get the above.

So if I have 10 houses they will be in parent table.

Each house will have a list of Rooms, so will those be in the child table. Will each Room be a separate row or will it be in some sort of array list? So will it be a single or multiple row per House?

Then same for Grandchild?

My main issue is regards to not having too many rows of data and combining it where possible due to Appsheet limitations.

[Hussein_Osseily]

I think i got your purpose, instead of having 
1

2

3

4

you'd rather have 1,2,3,4 ? 

But basically yes, what i explained is per row and seperate tables 
table for the parent , table for the child records  /table for the grand child

[mr_ravi]

Any other suggestions? 

In another system I have using MongoDB we store data such as {items: box, shoe, watch} inside one 'field'. So it's not 3 rows just for the items, but 1 row with an array inside it. Is that possible with Appsheet?

[MultiTech]

As @Hussein_Osseily has mentioned, you'll want to build out the appropriate tables for all of these things - with reference connections between them.

---

@mr_ravi wrote:

My main issue is regards to not having too many rows of data and combining it where possible due to Appsheet limitations.

---

Often people have the misconception that there is a limitation to the number of records/rows you can have in your app.

• There really isn't
• Okay there are... but they're manageable.

The limitation you'll hear discussed, is more due to "how long the app takes to load"

• Which is a product of how much data the app has in conjunction with how the app is built.

When properly built out, an AppSheet app can support a TON of data. 

• I've got an app that's an EMR, with 5 tables that we regularly maintain under 90k records each, on top of approx. 35 additional supporting tables.
• When the app loads it regularly completes around 1 million computations (sleight exaggeration 🙄lol) - putting together VCs, lists, slices, etc. - and takes 10-15 seconds to load.

[mr_ravi]

Thanks for the response. I will check this out then and see how a Google Sheet filled with lots of rows works..