Menu app link - can't think of a solution

Ratatosk
Participant V

Hi, I’m splitting my app into multiple apps,

Right now, I need to add the main menu sheet to every new app, which is quite a hassle, and it steals loading time. (The middle button on the bottom bar)

Any ideas on how to make an intuitive link/button to a menu app in every app without doing this?

Out of the box thinking would also be very appreciated. I might be attacking this the wrong way.

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Hello @Ratatosk , I believe this article contains the solution to your problem:

With that, you only need to create an action that uses that formula to link to your menu app.

EDIT: As for where to place that button, i’d consider placing it in a view that is central to each app, or several actually, it would be nice if we could create navigational buttons by placing the actions in the menu for example, but im afraid that’s not possible yet.

Hmmm wasn’t aware that you could place an action per view and not only per row.

Lemme check it out!

I dont think the adding menu view to app is not going to give an visible impact to the sync speed, but it is minimal.
What is making you difficult to add this menu view to each app? I actually have same use cases, to place the same menu view to a group of apps.
Yes, it is hard to add the same view each time, it is time consuming, but we do once, then no more concern.

What I do is make one spreadsheet just for menu.

Then for images and icon, I host images somewhere else, not within Appsheet. On the above mentioned speadsheet for menu, I place URL to reach out to such icon image with full URL.

From each app, I read this table. and make a gallery view.

Each app is refering to the same spreadsheet, and maintenance is easy. Just update spreadsheet and this change will be reflected to all the apps.

Adding full path url to the images will eliminate the works to add images to each app.

This is a great solution indeed, if you were to use the linktoapp() method that i mentioned, your users would have to wait out the loading screen that shows when moving from app to app just for loading the menu itself, which could be annoying for some people hehe.

Im saving that tip for myself as well, thanks @tsuji_koichi san !

This could be less-work-load as well as low-maintenance approach to re-use the spreadsheet to generate the same view over the different apps! Enjoy tips.

Hi I do the exact same thing as you.

My wish was to have the menu app saved to the device. This way it does not need loading time. In my tests it switches instantly, you hardly see the launch image before it is open.

But yes I think our solution would be better UX for the user than an action hack.

Why do you host images elsewhere? Is it speed? I save mine as base64 code in the spreadsheet. The menu icons then appear instantly and not pop up one after the other.

This affects sync time.

We dont need to upload images one by one, app by app. Reduce workload with us.

Interesting. May I ask what service you use?

Any file hosting service you can choose. I use google Firestone as it is free

Thank you! Testing it now.

So 360 mb a day is sufficient for menu icons i guess?

What do you mean?

The hosting free limit is 360 MB/day, according to Firebase.

Or am I missing something? Or maybe just make multiple accounts?

I tried the storage part with access token and it works fine. Is that the wrong place?

3X_c_3_c33f0bc0f265342078bcdb32de98b0a4791e67bf.png

Once you finish the upload file, then select file and you will see the property pane upper right.
Click access token, then you will get the URL which reach out to that file.

Then you paste that URL to your spreadsheet, appropriate cell. Turn that field to either image or thumbnail type.

That s it.

Yes, thanks, that is what I did.

I think i found the right documentation now:

1GB per day, which is plenty. 360 mb was the Hosting part, and that would have been a little to tight with 50 users.

Thank you for helping me with my ignorance

I m using Firestore for years, but not seeing much of issue, so it should be alright with the small amount of data as well as limited access per day.

I have problems with PNG’s in Firestore, both compressed and uncompressed.

SVG’s work fine, and the PNG link shows up in browser, but not in app.

Have you encountered this before?

No i never see that, strange.

I think I found the solution. Appsheet doesn’t play well with subfolders.

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