Appsheet Events Addon for Google Sheets - Issues and Advice

I’m hoping I can get some advice. I want a bot to run in my app when data is changed in my Google Sheet externally (not changed from within the app).

My understanding is that I need the Appsheet Events Addon. So I have installed the addon in my development environment and it worked, so I decided I’d try it in a second app. This time the bot didn’t trigger, but it did trigger if I made the change within the app itself (so the bot was working correctly).

So I decided to remove the addon and then re-install it. Now it works in my second app, but not my first.

So I guess my question is, how reliable is the Events Addon? Do other people have issues with it? Is there any way of knowing that it is working in any particular Google Sheet? Are there additional troubleshooting or investigations I can do?

My bots all work fine and behave as intended when the data is changed from within the apps themself, just not when changes are made directly to the sheet manually in one app.

I have read that an ‘add row’ made by a Google Form will trigger a bot (External eventing with Google Sheets | AppSheet Help Center), but then I also read in another support forum post that it does NOT work with Google Forms. I haven’t tried it yet from a Google Form, but that is my intended external data change, so I’d be keen to know definitively if it is designed to work when a Google Form adds a row.

If the Events addon is problematic, Is there an alternative method for detecting a change? I could run a daily bot to do my automation, but the bot is intended to email the person who used the Google Form a response with a code that they can use straight away.

Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated.

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The clarification I have read is that the add on only works with changes made physically by a person in the Google sheet. I suspect it’s a step towards triggering automation when changes are made by any process…AppSheet just isn’t there yet.

There are currently no other ways to trigger activity in the app in “real time” for any change made to the Google Sheet. The nearest capability is running Scheduled Bots (e.g. have 4 bots that run Daily at preset times) to check for conditions that warrant triggering activity.

I do wish to ask, if your intention is to use a Google Form to add data to a sheet and act on them in AppSheet, why not use Forms in AppSheet? You can create a dedicated section of the app that provides only the input Form(s) and you can encapsulate any functionality that a Google Form can - albeit in a different way. But then you have the added capability of triggering Bots or attaching actions on the Form Save itself.

Maybe even a better approach is have two separate apps - one for the input Forms and then your current app. You can add the automation to either app or even both if needed.

Thanks for the reply John…

The reason we are using a Google Form is that it is a customer satisfaction survey. A URL to the survey is sent out with every order as a QR Code. We want to send any customer who fills in the form a little reward by email, in the form of a voucher they can cash in when they purchase from the store again.

The idea of 4 bots is exactly what I was thinking. So it might be the best way forward. It’s a bit odd that the Appsheet Help Centre says:

For Google Forms, new rows added to the response sheet via direct interaction with the Google Form can also trigger events.

Maybe this needs the Google Forms Appsheet Addon to work?

I see that now. Maybe the clarification I referred to was about a particular use case/

I do read this line from the article:

In addition, you can enable the add-on for response sheets from Google Forms:

There is a link to click for more info that take you to here:

In my experience, the response sheet for a Google Form is not usually in the best format for an AppSheet app.

I still think you can do everything you wish from AppSheet but it does boil down to your preference and which tools you are most comfortable with.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of how the questions from a Google Form become the column headings. But I have found a tricky way of overcoming some of these issues.

Correct.

Note that this references the Google Forms add-on, n the Google Sheets add-on.

Correct. But in the External eventing article, it is implying that events in AppSheet can be triggered by rows added from a Google Form with this statement from the below article:

When you modify the sheet in Google Sheet, you should see the event trigger 
after a few seconds. For Google Forms, new rows added to the response sheet 
via direct interaction with the Google Form can also trigger events. 
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