๐Ÿ˜” Can you please turn back on the ability to create workflows and reports?

MultiTech
Participant V

People paying me thousands of dollars for software are not accepting the fact that we have to use this new system.

  • to them this is a giant red flag about the AppSheet platform

@praveen @Santiago

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33 REPLIES 33

Hi @MultiTech_Visions , maybe we can schedule a call early in the week. Letโ€™s include @prithpal and @Dan_Bahir .
I am under the impression that the things you could do in the โ€œold systemโ€ can identically be done in the โ€œnew systemโ€. Literally identically โ€” as in the tasks are the same, the templates are the same, the expressions are the same, the power is the same (actually more, but if you only want a linear set of steps, then you can do that exactly the same).
What is mainly different is the visual presentation of a sequence of steps. We had quite a few threads on this, some of this feedback has already been acted on, and there is active work in progress for more in the authoring UI.

At least, this is what is intended. It seems like you are running into more fundamental issues however? So it would really help to have this call where we can identify what the issues are. Then we can report that list of issues back into this thread for others in the community.

Does this sound like a plan? @prithpal would you please schedule this conversation with Matt? Thanks

Nope, nope, nope.

Currently, the additional features, such as return a value, call a process or other stuffs which are making the set ups more complicated, are working as a noise for majority of AppSheet creators.
Sorry to say, but this is reality.

Hi,

I copied an APP with workflow rules and the new APP is not working. I tried to tell in this topic.

[https://community.appsheet.com/t/copied-apps-workflow-issue/49443](Copied APP's Workflow issue)

Based on this, BOTS may be identical but the operation as a whole is not identical.

I think creators need some more time to switch to BOTS.
Can you please at least let the copied APPโ€™s workflows work?

Workflows in copied apps will work.

What you experienced is a bug that when cloning the App Events that are not used by a Bot are not assigned an Id and that is causing issues with the cloned App. A fix for that that will be rolled out, until then if you clone an app that has unused events, please connect them to a bot or delete them as a workaround.

MultiTech
Participant V

Works for me; see you on Tuesday.

Man, leave all our voices and wishes to your good hands as usual (on behalf of Community).
Good luck!!!

MultiTech
Participant V

Please feel free to link to any posts about things I may not be aware of.

  • Iโ€™ve got some deep technical bugs, as Praveen inferred, that Iโ€™ll be bringing up
    • but please feel free to list anything else thatโ€™s an issue.

For instance:

  • I donโ€™t have any apps that utilize webhooks, so if thereโ€™s any technical little fiddly bugs that people should know aboutโ€ฆ let them know here! (^_^)

Google team should have long list of the issues to be addressed for BOT stuffs, better to ask them to share the list with users, i.e. usโ€ฆ

I m not sure how many times I shared my own frastration in terms of new bot.
Dont take me wrong, BOT should have been adding new functionality. But the problem is we lost the intuitiveness.

AppSheet should have been a tool designed for citizen developper like me, but BOT sadly introduced the concept for programming to deal with. Return values, call another process is sort of programming concept. yes, we need to borrow such type of concept to achieve what we want to achieve to meet our daily business requirement.

The problem I see is the ballance betwee what we lose (intuitiveness of appsheet, i.e. ex-workflow which was easy-peasy). The gain after BOT is pretty much limited. 98 % of what we need to do with business app have been done by workflow without recent BOT stuffs.

What we gain is limited for me, but what I lose is too much. Not well- ballanced from my own prospective.

I m not claiming the emerge of BOT, but I welcome. But it is super difficult challanges.

We did not do any pool, but majority of community member here should not be happy with recent introduction with BOT, but prefer to have ex-workflow features, as they are intuitive and pretty much easy to handle with.

It is making sense Google is to shut down Workflow, as BOT will do the same stuffs. But the intuitiveness is sacrifaced.

For me, like a AppSheet creators for yeas and years, I m now perfectly understand how to deal it with BOT to do what I want. But this happends after spending bunch of days and weeks, or month. Now I can set up bot with my eyes closed

But this should not be what we want.

If Google wants to get AppSheet to tool for real citizen developper, then better to be back to workflow. Yes, BOT is in place, and need to pursue what BOT would be able to expand it s capabilities.

However, leaving workflow for App creator should not contridict with BOT neither.

I really need the ability to keep and retain the old-style workflow aside BOT settings

For instance, we create workflow. Then the event shold be added to event tab. Same story to Task. Once we make a task on workflow, the task should be visible on task tab.

For those who dont care about BOT (me), I stay with tab for workflow. Not move to Automation pane, unless i see the inevitable necessity to build a BOT.

Then peaceful world should come. Workflow and BOT live together.

This is a world what I dream now.

Everyone should be happy.

The recent problem is we appsheet users is left behind. Our feedback is not taken. This is the problem for Google, they do and take a path they want. But not taking into account users voices.

My perfect humble personnel opinion.

Hereโ€™s one, when I click the monitor button in one of my apps, it takes me to the โ€œAppsheet Monitoringโ€ app, but the app I just came from is not even listed in the available apps to monitorโ€ฆ


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A follow-up to this, my event filter condition expression was not setup correctly and thus had not run the process when I clicked the โ€œrunโ€ button on the bot. After I fixed the expression and clicked โ€œrunโ€ again, I now have the app shown in the list of apps. It would probably be better if the app showed up after I had clicked โ€œrunโ€ the first time and given me an error message of zero rows selected or something so that I could better troubleshoot my Bot.

Austin
Participant V

It just feels like there are tons and tons of issues with the new bots from now working to being overly complex to work with. I have 0 confidence moving or deploying any production system with the new bots. I am more confident that something will go wrong than I am that it will work. In addition to that, we faced instances of the old still enabled Workflow system suddenly, after MONTHS AND MONTHS of no issues, start to have issues. When youโ€™re entire recruiting and accounts payables systems along with countless other minor systems, rely on Appsheet working as intended and as it has been for months, you really start to worry when seemingly hastily decisions that you have no control and no influence on start affecting my ability to do not only my job but everyone else that uses my software to do their daily duties.

I see more bugs-error tags in the automation tabs than any other tag in that section it feels.

To make thnings far more simple, we should have two options.

  1. Workflow
  2. BOT

If we (appcreator) happy to set up โ€œautomationโ€ in a simple way, go to workflow. Super simple.

If app creator wanna do bit of complex stuffs, then ask BOT.

Again, based on my ongoing bussiness involving appsheet, I have not inevitable necessity to involve BOT, as workflow will do 99% stuffs what I want.

I have repeatedly stated, this is โ€œnot well ballancedโ€

To get the additioal features and functionaities a bit, we lost bunch of stuffs)

We will be opening up new online service E- learinng for Appsheet.

We filmed a session for BOT stuffs.

We made 4 simple bots. Event plus bare task (=workflow) simple.

We combines those four bots into one bots using call a process, if condition for a step etc.

Yes, we managed to make a single bot that do jobs 4 separate bots will do.

But it gives us (app creators) tons of pains.

Why do we need to have single bot while we can do separate bots (workflows) will do the jobs beatifullyโ€ฆ

Okey, this should be an end of the day for me, otherwise, I will be banned to place any comment like this in tihs community!!!

Nigh nigh everyone.

And I had to do the reverse when I found that one of my tasks has a chance of failing so when ran with a bot it would stop the remaining tasks from completing where when it was a workflow each task ran separately and didnโ€™t care if 1 or more tasks failed so there was no need.

Maing app is dealing with debugging all the time.

Complex bot is making this process harder and harder, compared wiht separetely build workflows.

In other post, I mentioned about the risk and danger in terms of the bot.

For instance, wait for a condition process, it only wait for 30 days.

If there is a boss who will take days off for 30 days, BOT will not be waiting for him/her to return. BOT pending process will die out.

This is another good example we should avoid bot , but prepare separete worflow based on different events.

Then question is back to why people is get excited with BOT? while Workflow has been doing better and reliable job?

Our company standard for now is to build a bot wiht simple bare task as a process. Never get involved call a process or returns a value other other new stuffs.

Again, im 100% sure and undertanding what BOT will do after spending bunch of hours with it. But even after that, we are not able to come up with any necessity to employ the bot, but we build our own bot in a simple way, i.e. event plus task.
BOT is doing perfect jobs. (meaning workflow does the jobs, like they did before.)

@tsuji_koichi I agree entirely.

Rather than developers trying to introduce new shiny toys all the time, the emphasis should be in maintaining backward compatibility especially when people have invested thousands of hours in developing apps using appsheet.

There always seems a drive in this industry to make things more and more complicated rather than more and more simple!

@Austin_Lambeth We are spending a lot of effort to simplify the concepts and remove any friction introduced by the added functionality, would it be possible to schedule a short call with you in order to get your feedback?

Thanks

We are currently very busy and I think my feedback can be summed up pretty quickly. I think the design is ok and fine; other than seeming excessive naming on every little part and the duplicate task part which in my case really screwed me since they look identical yet the : task is from a long time ago and the _ is pretty recent so my workflows tasks had changed in that time span and it cause me some major issues when I switched to bots.
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I think the friction is coming from thing not working or not seeming to work when the โ€œexactโ€ same thing worked in workflows. There are countless posts now about report not sending, emails not sending, emails duplicating, webhooks not firing, etc. As someone who regularly stalks the forum, I know that you have to put all of these posts through the user error filter but I see them from new userโ€™s first posts to veterans that I can except to have gone through checking formulas, spam inboxes, etc. And I see these posts resolved and confirmed by the user but the issue shows back up two weeks later from someone else. I didnโ€™t have this constant worry every time a workflow needed to trigger and thatโ€™s there with bots whether or not its warranted.

I agree.

Absolutely spot on

I would also like to follow-up with a clarification. I love new features and greatly appreciate the attempts at even better automation than we previously had via workflows. But, every time something breaks or doesnโ€™t work as expected we get hammered by our users who donโ€™t understand why something that previously worked fine is now broken. Stability and performance is necessarily more important than new features, especially when most users are using the software for business.

Add in long delays in replies from Support and you end up with devs (us) who have little control over their issues but are still getting blasted daily by users who expect resolution quickly.

This.

Yep. Iโ€™m fine getting grilled cause I broke a workflow by messing with it to get better performance, Iโ€™m not fine getting grilled because the app I havenโ€™t touched in 2 months is suddenly not working in a major capacity and I have no personal ability to fix it.

I think maybe a separation of feature rollouts to the different tiered Premium users might be in order. As an Enterprise user, I donโ€™t want fancy new features or changes at the whim of Appsheet. I need a rock solid platform that does what it has already been doing.

This.


This is already a thing, but itโ€™s not very well communicated

  • Like I know I have a corporate client of mine on a stable version (or whatever itโ€™s called)
    • These people donโ€™t get anything new until itโ€™s everywhere

I echo the same.

Same here, I would like the old process to still be available! It would appear that the new automation setup no longer allows to setup a scheduled email report on a Slice of data. Unless the new setup confused me that much that I am just not seeing how to get it done.

I think it is possible but there are some visual parts that donโ€™t make it clear. I donโ€™t use the reporting features so I cannot help other than notifying about what I have seen while stalking the forum.

MultiTech
Participant V

Hey everyone; hereโ€™s my take-away from the meeting.

Thanks for the update. Unfortunate the conversation was had only after going to production.

WHERE DO I BUY THAT SHIRT YOU HAVE ON IN THE VIDEO?

appsheet just let me post this why does the forum not think where do i buy that shirt is not a complete sentence?

Thanks! Iโ€™ve got a few of themโ€ฆ
https://multitech-merch.creator-spring.com

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