Delete Image with Deleting a Record

Hello AppSheet Team.
Great job and congrats for your Google Cloud merge.

When “deleting a record”, it would be great if we can have the option of “deleting or keeping” the attached “image”.

Thank you

Status Under Review
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18 Comments
AndreSpeek
Explorer

Good suggestion. And if I might add. Not just for deleting, but also when editing and replacing an image or file.

Koichi_Tsuji
Participant V

Why do you need to delete the file from storage? The storage service like google drive or alternatives are almost free to use or at minimal prices to use the service. Not cost or money implications behind?

Jonathon
Participant V

It may not be a matter of storage but organization.

For example, on projects I work on we are often required to turn everything over to our client at project completion. The easiest way for me to facilitate this is to structure my applications folder structures around clients and projects, and then simply compress and send the folders.

I would prefer not to send orphaned images to the client if possible, so currently I would have to go into these folders and manually delete the images which can be hard to do - it’s not immediately obvious which images are orphaned or not.

There are workarounds such as creating reports within AppSheet to export all the data, but this is extra work that could be avoided. Also, I prefer to provide clients with the raw image files rather than a pdf report of them.

Koichi_Tsuji
Participant V

Sharing app with client and they can copy the image if they want for further usage of the image. Let them do right click on image on appsheet and paste to place where ever they want to place. It seems more efficient for client to find out image they are looking for I the well organized appsheet view rather then they play around directly with folder which might looks messed up with bunch of images in my opinion.

Jonathon
Participant V

Our clients are government organizations. They need all the information at project completion so they can archive it / have it on hand in the event of a Freedom of Information request.

In these cases the information must be available outside of the AppSheet environment, and they would do a data dump of all information available onto the requester.

Moreover, it is our job to provide them the information in the format they have traditionally required. I can still do this, it just may require me to manually sort and remove deleted photos. I would support a feature that would prevent me from having to do this

AndreSpeek
Explorer

It can also be a privacy issue. If I upload the wrong photo by accident and I correct it, I don’t expect the wrongly uploaded photo to remain on the server.

Koichi_Tsuji
Participant V

I got it, guys thank you.
I voted.

Marcos_Ares
Participant I

Wherever there is the ability to create external artifacts (and appsheet provides such ability nicely not just for File or Image direct uploads but also via attachment templates), there should be the ability to destroy them too.

For privacy, for the right to be forgotten (GDPR), for organization, you name it.

Think about an app creating invoices or budgets or official letters and the ability to cancel them… Nobody wishes to have them cancelled at the app level and have no real ability to cancel them at the drive level.

What if you wish to share the drive with third parties for auditing or compliance matters ?

IMHO, being able to delete files and images in the drive is a real must. I voted too to increase the visibility of this topic further.

pravse
Staff

Thank you for raising this requirement and the useful discussion around the need for it.

This is an enhancement requested of our data model in terms of data lifetimes. As you point out, there are obvious cases where you’d want the images to remain, and there are obvious cases where you’d want the images to be deleted.

We have to think more about how to enable this and whether/when we can fit this into our schedule. We’ll come back with a response after some discussion.

Nabeel_Vandayar
New Member

Greetings all

I am new to App Sheet but I think I may have a solution to this problem (if you are using an AWS DynamoDB backend).
I haven’t tried it out, and I know it is probably too complicated, but here goes.
You could kick off a new workflow when a row (containing an image) is deleted and then call a webhook (while passing the image location columns as parameters) that kicks off a lambda function which goes to delete the files in S3.
I’ll try it out and report back here.
I’m not sure how this would work with other backend types.

erp_chiefway
Observer

Voted. It happened to my user during user testing phase, a user accidentally uploaded a personal image wrongly. He deleted the image from the appsheet app, but when I went into the gdrive, the image is still there on the server.

It’s good to have an option to “also remove file/image from server”.

Grant_Thornton_
Community Visitor

It is really necessary to implement the removal of attachments and more now with the limitation to 15GB of Google Drive

Suvrutt_Gurjar
Participant V

One could delete images from the G drive with the following workaround

Status changed to: Open
Pratyusha
Community Manager
Community Manager
 
Status changed to: Under Review
Roderick
Community Manager
Community Manager