Re: Posistion of column in Action stops it from wo...

1minManager · 12-10-2020 06:46 AM

I’ve been trying to isolate this issue for nearly 2 hours now…

So I’ve got this action that clears the contents of 4 columns. Can anyone explain why this works:

Yet moving [report] to the top causes it to not work. By this I mean when you click on the button nothing happens

All 4 are simple TEXT columns with no formulas and are just hidden. There is one slice that looks at [Report], though I don’t see how this could be the issue. [Copy To Site], [Copy To Plot] & [Copy Show] are only really used as part of a larger group of actions to store information on a temporary basis. They are only written to by other actions.

Steve

I’d call that a bug.

I will note, though, that a Data: set the values of some columns of this row action that does not produce a change to to the row is considered to have failed, and will stop further actions in a sequence from being performed. In this case, if the four columns’ values are already blank, the action (regardless what order the columns appear in the action) will fail. To avoid the failure, use the Only if this condition is true expression to confirm the column is not already as the action would set it. For instance:

ISNOTBLANK(
  CONCATENATE(
    [Copy to Site],
    [Copy to Plot],
    [Copy Show],
    [Report]
  )
)

1minManager

Hi @Steve thanks for that. I’ll bear that in mind. Though I’m not sure that really explains it as I made sure all 4 columns had something in them.

But since that (eventually) worked I progressed, and now I’m stuck again on something that should work. This is the main action the user clicks on. Everything works fine except it refuses to run the last item on this list of 7 items.

This is the final Action that does not work. It was previously looking at a slice that itself was dependant on something being in Defects[Report] so I changed it to a Select() function

And it calls this, now heavily simplified, Action. So I’m only asking it to clear one thing

Whats also a bit weird about clearing Defects[Report] is that when I make the Select Defect[Report] where ISNOTBLANK visable and manually click on it after the above has failed to complete, it works fine.

Another oddity is the second to last action Defect[Copy Show]=FALSE simply writes “FALSE” to Defect[Copy Show]. How come that works but setting Defect[Report] to “” does not? Is this anything to do with the fact we put data into Defect[Report] in step 2? I’m thinking along the lines of where a set the value of some columns in this row Action which sets and then resets a column will not trigger a Workflow. Instead you have to create 2 actions to set and clear the column, then another to do a execute a seqence of actions.

I had the same issue in an earlier question - Speed when creating new rows Which never really got answered. In this an action was working fine and all I did was use a workflow to call it. The action wouldn’t run and silently failed.

Any ideas?

Steve

Does DEFECT[Copy Show]=FALSE succeed? If not, no further actions will be performed.

1minManager

Yes this works fine

1minManager

Another half a day on this. So after much headscratching I’ve moved the Select Defect[Report] where ISNOTBLANK action so it is now called as the user saves the record. This worked.

For at least 5mins.

Then it stopped working.

So I thought through what I’d done, this is the conclusion.

This is the Action that is called on a save to the Defect table

This is the above execute an action on a set of rows action . Note its looking at the entire table to find ANY relevant rows. Though there will only ever be one match

This is the set values… Action that the above calls. It works fine if its like this

But if I want to to do more than just one thing, such as:

Then this doesn’t work. Also, and this make no sense to me whatsoever, it will not allow me to save the newly created record. The error I get is that a row with that ID number already exists. Except it doesn’t. I’ve checked and the only row with that ID number is the one its just created.

Luckily I can clear the [Copy to Site] and [Copy to Plot] columns in a different part of this process. But this whole actions section of Appsheet is not very intuative once you get into Actions calling other Actions. It’s definately got some bugs in there that really need removing.

Simon@1minManager.com

Steve

I’m completely confounded with this. You’ll probably need a developer to help investigate, which means involving support@appsheet.com. Sorry.

1minManager

Submitted. I’ll post the repsonse I get here for everyone to see

Posistion of column in Action stops it from working