How to bulk duplicate rows in table with certain columns changed?

elco
Participant IV

I have Users, Todo tables. Each Todo has Category & Assigned User among other things. Now I wish to use Category to bulk create Todo for User e.g. an action can be ‘Create all Onboarding category Todos for User XYZ’.

I’ve looked at the looping posts here. They’re helpful but fall short because I need to create a new copy of Todo rows and not reference existing items.

How can I achieve this? Is this even possible with the new ‘Automation’ features? Do I need to think of new data structure to make this easier?

You need to pass two pieces of information the User and list of To Do. But you can only do one with AppSheet. I’m stuck here.

This surprising limitation is because you cannot have non-virtual columns as List of Ref. Hope it’s added soon because this is super lame.

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Steve
Participant V

So get creative. What you want to do is possible.

Yep, or without. Either way.

Ooh! Now that’s creative!

You can have EnumList of Ref, though.

How old are you?

Thanks. But I don’t think it’s possible. Possible being reasonable to build and maintain. I can obv go crazy and create a table for each category. Or use multiple tables as a state machine. But that’s not sustainable. I want to stop developing this app at some point hopefully.

The documentation on the new ‘Automation’ features is very thin. Any timeline on when they will be complete?

Creative? Mad?

Yes, that is what I have. But then when you use elements from this column it complains about type mismatch and removes the value.

Too old to be able to understand for all this fancy simple-to-use-even-without-a-masters-in-CS product.

Stupid and random limitation are lame. We make a plan where we can use lists and noooo… AppSheet lied and wanted to hide the fact they’re not available non-virtual columns; then why give them as an option? This is poor communication on your side and leads to disappointment.

You’re wrong–or not fully describing the complexity of what you’re trying to do. Either way, you seem quite committed to failure.

What’s confusing you? It’s as simple as it seems. Copy rows by X filter and [User] columns set to Y. You need to loop, and create cache table, and state graph and locking mechanism and uniqueness constraints …

I would have thought this would be most basic action type. Bulk duplicate data is simplest form of automation.

You’re right. I’m certainly not committed enough to spend a week solving this issue. Because we have an existing solution. This was meant to be simpler and better not worse.

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