Is there a limit on how many reports you should have? Or a best practice?

[Tiger1]

I am wondering if there is a best practice or limit on reports you build. I have built an app to basically run a report every 5 minutes. I did so in order to check my table and shoot an email in a timely manner. I was wanting to move to every minute - if this is ok to do. I do not want my app to suffer or slow down.

So my question is if anyone knows if there is a limit on how many reports or a best practice to this?

Also - is there a way to put them in order? When i built them at fist i didn’t do all of them. I’ve added as i went on and it is kind of confusing/hard to search through when out of order:

[Austin]

I don’t believe there would be a limit although why do you not use a workflow on adding dispatch tickets? this may be a silly question but are the appsheet reports the right way of doing this?

[Tiger1]

From what i understand when trying to throw/fire a workflow rule - the data must have changed through the app. The workflow rule would work for that. However- my table changes automatically without anyone changing info in the app. Does that make sense? Anyway - i was told to create reports instead. That way the report (timed and dated) will look at the table at that EXACT time and date and fire off.

[Austin]

That understanding is correct so there is a reason to not use a workflow. The other is appsheet the best place to be doing this is still up for debate. I don’t have a solution that is reasonable.

[Tiger1]

Yeah - this app i built does nothing else. I don’t even have users. I built a user table. So when the report fires- it fires emails based on that user table. But no one EVER goes into this app for anything.

[Austin]

As far as a limit goes I doubt there is one(there might be a theoretical limit but id assume its at least over 100) but as far as best practice goes I’d think a different service is necessary.

[Tiger1]

I already have 155. If i go every min - i will be over 400

[LeventK]

May I ask what’s the meaning of sending a report every minute?

[Tiger1]

The reports are dispatch tickets from the dispatch ticket table. My company wants as real time as possible.
I had it set up to do every 15 min. Each report would look back 15 min and run/email any data based on one value - [Status] = “open”. If it is closed - it wont send anything. I have found with 15 min - it is too slow sending emails to my company users. They want more a REAL time feel. I am having trouble with something though. I believe it is a time server issue. I currently have ALL reports running every 5 min. I have the report looking [Creation Date] - 7 min. So i am basically overlapping by 2 minutes. The reason is if i put it EXACTLY 5 min - it misses some new rows. I think the time servers are off, but not sure.

[LeventK]

You have expressed about 400 reports and this is a huge server traffic load provided you take into account a huge number of AppSheet apps and processes are running. I believe what you are trying to establish is not so reliable or realistic unfortunately. You can use Google Apps Scripting instead but even with that you will quickly hit the daily quota.

Have you considered provided AppSheet is the right platform for what you want to develop?

[Tiger1]

I looked into Zapier - and it requires a payment plan. Not sure what else would work.

[APiCC_Conor]

Could you create a live dashboard instead of generating a report for every 15 minutes? I would try to find some sort of live reporting solution since you want it to be as current as possible.

[Tiger1]

Live dashboard?

[LeventK]

Limitation of dataset for a report Questions

There is a limit on the total execution time for any individual Report invocation. If you are updating thousands of rows you might exceed that time limit. You may need to break the work up into separate Reports that each update a reasonable number of rows.

[Grant_Stead]

YES how awesome is that… Someone is basically using appsheet as a near free document automation situation…

[Tiger1]

Yeah. I am guessing no one else does this with Appsheets?

[Grant_Stead]

I do some light… Appsheet isn’t really great at something like this… But heck it’ll do it!

[Tiger1]

Do you know of another/ better software solution for this? I intend on using Appsheets for everything here - but if it just isn’t built to do this kind of task - maybe it’s best i get it done elswhere.

[Grant_Stead]

It honestly just depends on what you’re trying to do… If you got it done, then just let it eat…

[Tiger1]

thx

[Austin]

Haven’t ever used appsheets report feature before. We had other solutions that already created reports automatically for us before we got appsheet.

[Phil]

We are in the process of adding a new feature that will allow you to trigger a workflow rule if a value in a Google Sheet is changed directly through Google sheets (rather than through AppSheet). This feature will be released in the next few weeks. When that feature is released please use it rather than running a Report very frequently.

[Tiger1]

Will it work with Microsoft Excel? I am not using Google Sheets. My company needed queries that run every minute (real time) so Microsoft was our choice.

[Lynn]

@Phil
Hi, did this feature get released?