File Picker for Google Drive

lhoffman · 11-23-2020 06:19 AM

I’m migrating an essential app from Google App Maker to AppSheet, and I can’t figure out how to give users a Google Drive File Picker to connect a document that lives in our domain to a record.

I know I can have people download files from Drive and then upload them in AppSheet, but from a UX standpoint, that makes no sense – not only does it introduce workaround steps that shouldn’t be necessary, but it creates a new version of the file in Drive, which defeats the purpose of having the canonical version of it live there in the first place.

Can anyone help with this?

Austin

In essence, no this isn’t possible in a practical method. You can get around it but you’d need a list of all the file names with the full path in a table to reference in order to make a workaround, and it wouldn’t have a folder hierarchy structure.
IF every future file can be uploaded from Appsheet then you would be able to make a system to handle it better than if you have to handle files coming in from other sources.

Koichi_Tsuji

Not sure if it is prefered solutions with you, but why dont you let the user to install Google Drive for desktop application?
Once the appsheet opens the file picker then they can pick the files from there.

Secondly, using the tricks I recently shared with the community to list up all the file names as well as file Ids sitting in a target google drive folder in a spreasheet, then read such spreadsheet as table for your app. Then you set up enumlist selections in a filed where they pick up the rows for each files. Yes, this is not picking up the files to the app as well as backend of the app, but you can place the URL links to the selected files from appsheet app.

Marc_Dillon

That’s a cool solution that I’ve never heard before. Have you actually used this? Does it create duplicates of the file, or does it record the file path of the original file on the Drive?

Koichi_Tsuji

Yes, i m using to get the downloadable url and present that URL on the app. For instance, user upload the file or images from App, then this will trigger to refresh the spreasheet, i.e. to re-run the script to get the latest list of files name/file IDs.

Koichi_Tsuji

Marc_Dillon

Yah I got that, I was asking about using the Google Drive Desktop app.

Koichi_Tsuji

Sure. I m not using Google Drive Desktop app, as it will consume the local storage…
In the past, i used it, but deleted just because of that.

lhoffman

It’s a clever solution, but it doesn’t tackle the fundamental UX problem.

We’ve used Google Workspace for over 5 years, and we’ve trained our staff to save everything in Drive. They also know that a shared Drive is the place to look for official versions of things. This works great for us, especially for the 30% or so of our staff who use Chrome OS. A Drive file picker is something everyone’s comfortable with.

The solutions you’ve all mentioned would address the technical issue, but they’re workaround-y, and I really resist spending time on trying to “make it work”. The less elegant – but much simpler solution – would be to just have staff copy a Drive file URL and paste it into a URL field. That would at least bring in the file Id in case there’s a better integration down the road.

Now that AppSheet is part of Google Cloud, it really should have a native Drive file picker.

elco

This will be amazing and is totally needed. So many things will improve with just this component.

Would love to make an official feature request. How can we make one?

I get the sense that even through AppSheet was acquired by Google they’re operating as a separate company; Google just wanted a stake in GUI App Builder business because it’s only going to get bigger. So far they don’t treat Google as special source and only try to invest resources in building things that’s possible in most sources.

Scott_Nesbitt

Any news on a native Drive file/folder picker? Would love to be able to pick a folder to export files to.