How to handle multi level lists?

Rafael_ANEIC-PY · 03-19-2021 11:30 AM

Hello friends, i want to build an app to create and print construction progress certificates, but there’s a problem:

These certificates can have lots of sublevels, for example:

1.10 HYDROSANITARY FACILITIES
1.10.1 RUNNING WATER
1.10.1.1 PROVISION AND PLACEMENT OF PIPES
1.10.1.1.1 Polypropylene thermofusion tubes

If there was only 2 levels (a parent and a child) it would be fairly straightforward, but given that there could be a lot of them, i can’t imagine an easy way to pull it off

These sublevels must have references between them in some way, because i’m gonna set up a gdoc template for printing the certificates with the relevant values to each one of the lowest level items.

Has anyone done something like this before? if you did, how ?

Steve

Where do you see difficulty?

Rafael_ANEIC-PY

I find it difficult to imagine how i’m going to handle the sublevels in a way that let’s me easily drill throught them when i build the workflow template, since im going to have to cover from the most basic case of a parent and a child table, to a case of a great-great-great-great parent table all the way down to the last child table.

Marc_Dillon

I suggest a single, self-referencing, table. This will allow any number of levels. Each row either references its single parent, or nothing.

Steve

@Marc_Dillon, bingo!

Steve

The big problem will be the template, since you can’t recurse. Instead, you’ll just have to decide what level of nesting you’re going to allow and code for it explicitly. Ugly, but I don’t see another way.

level-1
<<If: level-2 exists>>
level-2
<<If: level-3 exists>>
level-3
<<If: level-4 exists>>
level-4
.
.
.
<<EndIf>>
<<EndIf>>
<<EndIf>>

Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!

Rafael_ANEIC-PY

I wonder how far i could push the self referencing technology haha , never tried this before, could i create a [Related something] pointing at the same table? that way i would do this:

and i could have an auxiliary column, that would enumerate the “level” of the row, so i could use nested start expressions and the [Related something] of each row to drill in deeper in this self referencing nightmare?

Steve

You could. In fact, you’d have to, as AppSheet won’t generate the Related … columns for references to the same table.

You could…

You wouldn’t strictly need the level enumerated to use the nested references.

Rafael_ANEIC-PY

Thanks guys @Steve @Marc_Dillon, i’ll give it a shot, y’all gave me the push i needed to get started

Rifad

Anyone got this figured and working?

Ratatosk

I just say, dear lord, I don't envy your problem! 😅