I am sure that what I am doing is wrong. Look...

Christian_Farle · 06-16-2018 05:00 PM

I am sure that what I am doing is wrong. Looking for best practices in this instance:

As we know, appsheet automatically creates a reverse “Related items [Ref Table]” each time we create a ref column. In some situations these Related items columns are not used in my workflows. And they often have a non-trivial impact on sync performance.

I tried deleted them but Appsheet will recreate them each time. So I cheat by keeping the column but replacing its app formula by “1”, which nullifies its impact on performance.

Is this a no-no? Are there dangers to this approach? Or is there a simpler (less hacky) way?

Aleksi_Alkio

I believe it should not make any harm.

pravse

@Christian_Farley2, best not to cheat on this. I don’t believe the performance impact is significant. The information in each ref column is repeated strictly once on the other side of the reference. In the big scheme of things, this is a small extra bloat and doesn’t take a lot of time.

The performance analyser can be misleading if it indicates (superficially) that this takes a lot of time. If you drill into that, you’ll find that the time was actually in waiting for the underlying table to be read. i.e. if table B has a reference to table A, and in the perf timings for reading table A you see a lot of time for computing the reverse ref column to B, then the actual cause of the delay usually is because it is waiting for B to be read from Google Drive (or wherever the source of data is).

Aleksi_Alkio

So… my assuming was wrong

Christian_Farle

Thanks for the clarifications guys. I am comforted that the cheat should not make any harm, but understand that it may not be worth the trouble performance wise.

pravse

Actually, I cannot be 100% certain that there won’t be some harm from changing that formula. There are assumptions in various places that the reverse ref formula produces a list of refs. So if it is replaced by a formula that returns a number, there might be some odd anomaly popping up in some unexpected corner of the app.

Aleksi_Alkio

“…in some unexpected corner”