When and why to use {} in Appsheet

[peterson]

Hello guys, I'd like to know what is the use {} in Appsheet. I see it often in some examples, but I never read anything about it, neither have I seen anybody mentioning this in a video.

Take a look at the example below that I got in the appsheet documentation page:

TOP(LIST("Red", "Yellow", "Green"), 2) returns a list of 2 items: Red, Yellow

TOP({"Red", "Yellow", "Green"}, 4) returns a list of 3 items: Red, Yellow, Green

[TeeSee1]

As far as I know it's just a different way to create a list just like you have the function concatenate and ampersand for concatenating strings 

Might save you a few keystrokes

[MultiTech]

This is correct, it is another short hand way of creating a list, but it also has some eccentricities that can cause problems. 

You're better off not doing this and instead using the official list function to create a list:  

List("item", "item")

This was something that Praveen told me back in the day during one of our interactions, and indeed I have encountered some situations where this syntax has caused problems - most of those situations dealt with automation and executing something from a bot. 

So all in all you'd be better off to abandon trying to use this as a way to generate a list, and instead use the function. 

[TeeSee1]

Better be safe than sorry I guess