I have 7 virtual columns that are derived fro...

[Evan_Manrow]

I have 7 virtual columns that are derived from a small set of inputs, like so:

Timestamp Name Date Weight Goal (Virtual) StartWeight (Virtual) ← Ref to the first weight an individual entered BackRefStartWeight (Virtual) ← BackRef created by StartWeight LostWeight (Virtual) PoundsToLose (Virtual)

PercentLost (Virtual) PercentProgress (Virtual) Pace (Virtual) AheadBehind (Virtual)

As you can imagine, most of of those virtual columns are calculated using the first two: StartWeight and Goal.

I show each of these virtual columns on the table and detail views, but I don’t really want any of them on the form, which should just have a name, date and weight. Following the advice of a previous post I tried to set their Show_Ifs to FALSE, and changed the UX → Options → Apply Show-Ifs Universally to FALSE as well.

The trouble is, if I switch the ShowIf of either Goal or StartWeight to FALSE, AppSheet throws errors for every row they depend on saying Goals/StartWeight can’t be found. Worse yet, when I re-set ShowIf to blank or true, those errors persist, meaning I have to roll-back my whole app using version history!

At the moment I have the form set to hide everything except those two Virtual Columns. Is there any way to hide them as well, that won’t completely break my app?

I figure I could re-write each of the other rows to not depend on StartWeight and Goal, but those two Virtual Columns have pretty lengthy AppFormulas as is, and it would seem incredibly wasteful to do so, if even possible.

[pravse]

Hi @Evan_Manrow, Show_If is only supposed to affect presentation. So whatever you do in ShowIf should not cause errors to be thrown. I suspect something else is going on. Evidence of this is that even when you flip it back to true, you are still seeing errors.

What do the error messages say? Usually, they tell you what is going on. If we can’t figure it out from the error message, could you please give me the app name and the version number that shows the errors

[Evan_Manrow]

The error messages are “Unable to find column…” (screenshot below) Prior to this change (v1.000175), there are 0 errors, 0 warnings. The only change I made was changing the ShowIf for the virtual column [StartWeight] to FALSE (v1.000176). Changing it back to blank and saving still shows the same errors (v1.000177), but reverting to before the change (obviously) gets rid of them. I’ve done this ShowIf/Revert loop like 5 times now lol.

App: 2018 Weight Loss Competition

[Evan_Manrow]

So for what it’s worth, I re-made these virtual columns on a separate column that didn’t have a bunch of Google Docs formulas, and I am getting the same errors if I change the “Display Name” of those virtual columns.

There’s got to be something wonky going on with how virtual columns are displayed. The only thing I can think of is that the App Formulas make reference to some columns with long names, on account of them being cross-populated by a Google Form that uses the headers as questions. But I don’t want to change them to be shorter, even as a test, because then if someone submits that Google Form it will add new columns to my Google Docs with the old/long name…