gSheets edits reverting?

[Neal_MF_Harper]

I am told by two of my team members that edits they are making in Appsheet are populating but then reverting to the previous state. These are Job assignments, I can see the correct edits in the log and they populated to the team, meaning the Google spreadsheet was updated. But somehow the changes reverted back to the previous assignment. There are only 3 of us with access to the backend sheet and have not been making edits there.

Anyone with similar experience with advice, very disturbing issue as peak season approaches.
Thanks in advance for any insight.
Neal

[Phil]

Hi Neal,

I suggest you start by looking at Audit History to see what updates are occurring.
If two or more people are updating the same record, it is possible for one user’s changes to overwrite another user’s changes.

See https://help.appsheet.com/articles/962224-concurrent-usage-with-multiple-users

[Neal_MF_Harper]

So it took me awhile to figure this out…

The assignment was made and synced to the gSheet at 9:11am, but then a user another user edited a different column of the same row at 9:26am. Since the second machine had not yet synced to the new assignment, it was overwritten with the old assignment, even though they made an edit to a different column.

What are some options here for dealing with sync delay issues like this? Other than the obvious of asking users to sync before edits… thanks everyone!

[Aleksi]

In generally that’s the normal behavior when working with databases… last one wins. You can only avoid it (though not 100%) if you check when the data was updated before modifying the record.

[Neal_MF_Harper]

If you time stamped each row with a “last edited column”, would there be a way to return an error if the row the newest user is trying to sync does not match?

Maybe two time stamp columns of last two edit times that compare somehow to let the user know they are syncing with an outdated version of the data and need to refresh before editing, anyone tried this?

Thanks for the feedback!

[Aleksi]

If you add a virtual column to your table with the expression NOW(), you could check if that value is older than the DateTime value that you are updating at this moment. If it’s more than 2 minutes older, the user can’t save the update.