Computer column value not updating after form edit

[Jerry_Thorpe]

I have a google sheet “Sheet A” that contains a number of ID columns and Description columns
Each ID column is referenced to another sheet (one for each one of the referenced columns). Those other sheets contain the ID (as their key) and a Description column.
The Description column in each case for Sheet A has a compute state to use the appropriate ID to retrieve the Description from the referenced table. Yes, I know this means I have created a copy of the data but for reporting purposes etc., it is much simpler to work with one table.
For half of the pairs of ID and Description in Sheet A, everything seems to work as expected.
For the other half, when the ID is changed (by the user selecting a new value on a drop-down in the edit form), the ID field is updated, but the computed field does seem to be triggering at all.
I’ve checked the audit log and the affected fields are not listed in the updated values, but there are no errors.
I’ve checked the google sheet version log and that also shows that only the fields that appear to be working as expected are indeed the only ones being changed…

Any ideas what could be stopping my fields from triggering the compute calculations for some of the columns but not others?

[MultiTech]

@Jerry_Thorpe that’s a weird one.

How are you accomplishing the compute column? What formula are you using?

[Jerry_Thorpe]

I’ve tried a couple - one that is a simple reference lookup and one that is just a fixed text value to keep it really simple.

To be clear, here’s a bit more detail:

The table in question is “Animal Details”.

This table contains a column called “Animal Type ID”. This is defined as a reference to table “Animal Types”
The Animal Types table contains two columns, “Animal Type ID” and “Animal Type Description”

The Animal Details table contains another column called “Animal Type Description”.

This is defined with a compute formula of [Animal Type ID].[Animal Type Description].

When the Animal Type Id in the Animal Details table row is changed by the user, it should automatically update the Animal Type Description column for the same row, based on the retrieved description.

In this particular case, when the ID is changed on the row, nothing happens to the Description column content - it doesn’t even attempt to update it with the same value (which is what I thought might have been the problem, if for example it was looking at the previous value of the ID for some reason).

That’s the specific issue that I first noticed.

I then changed the compute for the Animal Type Description column to just be “Fixed value”, so that I could check it would just update the record with that value, no matter what the ID was.

Same problem, it didn’t change the description column at all.

I have the same problem with 5 other columns in the same table. Other columns doing the same thing in the same table do worth correctly though. The only common factor I can think of is that for each of the problem columns, the name of the column in the google sheet was changed recently. The table structure was updated in appsheet and correctly shows the new value but maybe the update wasn’t successful in some way…? I have repeated the update but it makes no difference…

I’m wondering if the next step is to completely remove the affected columns from the google sheet, update the structure again, restart appsheet, the add the columns back into the google sheet, update the structure again and set the computes back up… that will be my next step I think unless there are any suggestions…?

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[Jerry_Thorpe]

Quick update. Dropping the column from the google sheet, updating the structure in appsheet, closing appsheet, re-adding the column to the google sheet, updating the structure in appsheet and re-adding the compute seems to have solved the problem in the first one I have tried this on, so I have a potential work-around. Now to repeat with the other affected columns. Not a real solve as I don’t know what caused the problem, but I can get on…

[Lucinda_Mason]

I have found, often, that when updating columns in Sheets and even after regenerating in AppSheet, that I have to refresh the entire tab to get AppSheet to recognize the changes. You probably tried this already but just in case you hadn’t.

[Jerry_Thorpe]

Thanks for the suggestion but I had tried that - Appsheet just seemed to get a bit confused until I dropped the column completely, resynched everything, closed everything and started again by re-adding the column from scratch.