Hi, I have a question to naming of photos tak...

Hi, I have a question to naming of photos taken. In the documentation of appsheet I find:

“Each image file name is prefixed by the key of the row being updated, the column name, and a short representation of a timestamp. The structure of the filenames and folder structure is not changeable. However, you can use a computed-key if you would like to have more meaningful names for these files.”

I try to use the computed-key. The key looks like CONCATENATE([Group],": ",[city]). So I would expect files names as “group1: Miami.photo1.xxxx.jpg”. But the names appear as “Miamigroup1.photo1.xxxx.jpg”. My feeling is that appsheet simly uses the column names in the computed key in the order they are in the table and not considering the concatenated string.

What do I miss here?

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@Christoph_Bucker your concatenation includes a colon ( which is not accepted as a proper filename with the majority of the platforms including the clouds. Therefore as you have noticed, AS had substituted your colon with a dot(.) following your group name. As it’s stated in the help documentation, AS records the images with the format:

KeyColumnValue.ImageColumnName.hhmmss.jpg

In this format, what you can change is only the KeyColumnValue with a ComputedKey. So if you change your ComputedKey expression to:

CONCATENATE([Group],".",[City])

your image filenames will be something like:

Miamigroup1.Florida.ImageColumnName.hhmmss.jpg

and all these images will be placed under the folder:

gDriveRoot/appsheet/data/appName-yourAccountID/tablename

Thanks @Levent_KULACOGLU for your response. I tried already without the colon and using a dot. In my view the resulting name is still inconsistent. You wrote with CONCATENATE([Group],".",[City]) I should get a name of

Miamigroup1.Florida.ImageColumnName.hhmmss.jpg (why Florida?).

By applying the formula above I would expect the [group] first (here group1) followed by the dot in the concatenation followed by the [city]

(here Miami), e.g.

group1.Miami.ImageColumnName.hhmmss.jpg

Okay… I didn’t test in that way. I will test again.

It seems that the file name is reading columns values in the same order you have them on your table.

the computedkey has a default formula using ": " between the key columns. this works well as key, but as we have found now, it does not work as planned and documented for the file name. I hope that we can have a correction for that. would be really nice, as it is quite important for me.

@Christoph_Bucker I don’t have any idea about your sheet and header names as well, so mine was just a simple guess of what it might be as a sample (Miami >> FL etc.).

Can you give a screenshot or write down what kinda inconsistency you’re getting as a result of your filenames with ComputedKey usage?

@Levent_KULACOGLU

my example was kind of “internationalised”, so a screen shot does not help. But it is easy to write it down:

[ComputedKey] has formula CONCATENATE([Group],".",[City])

Image Column name: [photo1] Value of [Group]

=

group1 Value of [City]

=

Miami Expected file name:

group1.Miami.photo1.hmmss,jpg Real file name Miamigroup1.photo1.hhmmss.jpg

So the formula has not been taken into account at all because - of wrong sequence of the columns - missing dot

Try to remove the “.” away from the virtual column and see what happens.

All my tests indicate that Appsheet does not take the ComputedKey Formula into account for the filename. The computed key itself works fine with the formula, but not for the file name. For example if I change the sequence from the 2 columns in the table, the sequence in the computedkey changes as well, but without the dot from the formula. So this is a bug in my view.

@Aleksi_Alkio even this does not change the behaviour.

hi appsheet team , hi +AppSheet, could one of you please comment whether the described issue will be resolved? I really need a solution to have the capability to identify the images more easy.

@Christoph_Bucker I investigated this issue and I found out this. The image’s file name is using just normal columns. You can use virtual key column to combine them, but without any additional strings.

For example… if you type CONCATENATE([ColA],"-",[ColB]), the result will be the same than CONCATENATE([ColA],[ColB]).

Hi @Aleksi_Alkio , thanks for investigation. This is not fully correct. If the sequence of your columns in the table is ColB before ColA, then the concatenation does not work. In the filename is then [ColB][ColA]. As I said, this is a bug and for the filename the formula is never used. That is also the reason why any additional string is simply ignored.

Hi all!
I was struggling with naming of photo. I’ve read this topic but it’s still not clear for me. How to change default name of every photo. Can somebody explain step-by-step? I have got the column “Take a photo” with type “image”. That is all. What is the next?

Hi,
as described in a comment above the name of an image can not be controlled in an easy way. The format is always:

You may be able to add unique text in the key column of the table where your image is stored.

John_Kent1
Participant I

Im keeping the entire file name by starting the name with period and not using anyother periods in the file name. This adds the entire file name to the unique id created by appsheet.

so if I had file named like this 1234.location.06.03.2021, it would pretty much scrap the entire file name on upload.

if I name it like this

.1234_location_06_04_2021

It adds that entire file name to the unique id .

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