Formula error - bad data?

[jOhn_Doe]

I have an Appsheet application that is meant to take registrations and sign-ins on a public/kiosk style tablet. That means there is no way to view the records that are being entered before or after syncing because of the obvious privacy concern. Every so often, someone does something that causes the below error.

Internal Error: Row with key [8/19/2019 19:09:23] not added because the app believes that column 'Student Name contains a formula but the data structure seems to have changed.

And since I cannot view the inputted data (due to kiosk-style permissions), I don’t know what user is causing this problem. The only solution when this happens is to clear the app data in Android. I either need a way to understand this error and prevent it, or view the inputted data in a password protected way. Any ideas?

[Steve]

Is someone accessing the backend spreadsheet by some other mean?

[jOhn_Doe]

Definitely not

[Steve]

For this issue, I suggest you contact support@appsheet.com directly.

[Luis_Regalado]

Hi there!

I am having the same issue. The app is actually connected to an spredsheet that is used by a team of 4.
Do you know why the new records are not registering?

[Steve]

Which “same issue”?

[Nikita_Derevian]

Hi John

I’ve got the same message coming up. Happens every so often, but if it does, I have to re-enter the local data which takes ages. Did you figure out what was wrong?

Thanks.

Nikita

[EJ1985]

Hi,

Has anyone resolved this error? I'm having the same thing happen but only when I have to create a NEW parent entry being used in a formula in the child table. Essentially, if the parent entry does not exist yet, I have a child form pull up the parent form for the new entry with the parent key. This is the first event that will be synced. Then I can continue with the child form. But when I go to sync the two events, I get the error:

Unable to add row to table 'CHILD TABLE'. → Internal Error: Row with key [CHILD-c4726953] not added because the app believes that column 'Parent Names' contains a formula but the data structure seems to have changed.

The 'Parent Names' column in CHILD TABLE has this initial value formula:  [Parent Key].[Parent Names]. I'm new to AppSheet but I thought this formula would pull the Parent Names value from the PARENT TABLE.

[Parent Key] is a Ref column in the CHILD TABLE.

If the entry already exits in the PARENT TABLE, there are no issues syncing. That's where I get confused. I'm assuming it has to do with the entry not existing in the PARENT TABLE and then the syncing of the CHILD TABLE trying to pull information from it at the same time.

I'm honestly pretty lost. I tried several approaches and can't seem to get it to work. I was going to write a Sheet Formula to try and get around it somehow as a last resort.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

E

[EJ1985]

I finally figured out the reason for the error in my case (it only took 24+ hours of reading forums and tinkering :'D). I thought I'd post my solution in case anyone else is having a similar error. After reflecting, the solution based on the error message was pretty evident:

Internal Error: Row with key [CHILD-c4726953] not added because the app believes that column 'Parent Names' contains a formula but the data structure seems to have changed.

It looks like the sync was having issues with the Spreadsheet formula for the 'Parent Names' column (a concatenation of multiple other column entries). I simply added the formula directly in the App Editor under App Formula and used the column header names and removed the Spreadsheet formula. I'm still not certain about the underlined portion of the error message. However, I'm assuming what was happening is that the PARENT TABLE entry was synced (added to the table), then the formula would compute (changing the data structure), and then there would be an error due to that when the CHILD TABLE entry tried to sync.

That solved it for me. Not more sync errors.

P.S. It did not produce an error if a PARENT TABLE entry was submitted independently and once synced a new CHILD TABLE entry was submitted (e.g. at a later date). I'm assuming it's because the PARENT TABLE would then have had a chance to add the new data and also compute the Spreadsheet formulas.