Drop down reference list

Rudy_Souw
Participant I

Hi there,

I am doing a test on appsheet atm and I have been stuck on this for few days now. Really appreciate if someone can help.
below is my appsheet and google drive login (donโ€™t worry, its entirely test account)
ID: souwrudy@gmail.com
Pass: rudysouw123

So here is the issue. I am learning about drop down column atm. On facility ID column in "inspection table, i link it to the facility ID column in โ€œfacilityโ€ table.
All looks fine to me but I wonder why when I select the facility ID menu below, what comes up is agent name with building image?

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2 REPLIES 2

Hi @Rudy_Souw,

Hi @Rudy_Souw,

The referencing between two tables works in such a manner that in case of reference column, the drop down shows the label of the reference table rather than the key of the reference table.

I believe this arrangement to display the label rather than key column in drop down is because more often than not the keys of the table are cryptic and not user friendly whereas the app creators is expected to select a column as a label for the record that is user friendly such as name or business name etc. This helps the app user to see a user friendly value to select rather than a cryptic key.

You will find that in the backend , the key column of the reference table gets saved rather than the label.
I believe faculty ID is the key column and agent name is the label of your facility table.

Hope this helps.

To expand on what @Suvrutt_Gurjar has said.

When you insert a Ref column, think about it as a selected object rather than a selected ID.

For example, in your inspections table, I would name the facility column as just simply โ€œFacilityโ€. This is more intuitive and user friendly.

Technically you ARE saving a link to that Facility row and thatโ€™s done by saving the row key in the data. But this link allows you to pull in other information from that facility row, like:

[Facility].[Name]  
[Facility].[Location]
[Facility].[Picture]
[Facility].[Agent Name]
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