New Bug Encountered: error in expression not noticed

[Frank_G]

Hi there,

I just discovered an issue with the automatic check on expressions.
The logic is checking for the correct amount of opened and closed parentheses

And it also does so for ’ and " characters.
But I discovered it does NOT do this check with the ‘[’ and ‘]’ characters.

I ran into this issue when the calculation of a column was not working as expected.
In the end I noticed the missing ‘[’, but it would have been nice if the expression assistant would have helped me in noticing!

This is an example of this situation:

As you can see the field ShiftDate is spelled incorrectly as the starting ‘[’ is failing and the assistant is still indicating that the expression is valid.

I hope you will amend this to help avoiding this issue in the future.

Kind regards,
Frank Gelton

[Pratyay_Rakshit]

It will not show up as an error because the Shiftdate] here is interpreted by Appsheet as a block of text called ShiftDate] rather than a column value.

You can deduce that from the expression clarification. When something is taken as a column, it means that you have correctly put it within square brackets and there exists a pertinent column. The clarification message will show up like ‘The value of column ShiftDate is equal to …’ like it did in the second condition (numbered 2 in the message).

Here due to squre brackets not been given, it will take that as a text value and compare it with the Date from the row referenced by EmployeeDate_REF. That will output a null select expression as no date could possibly be equal to ShiftDate], but the expression is very much valid.

[Frank_G]

Your explanation makes sense if you interpretate the expression pure textually.
But be honest: how many users will create a column with the character ‘[‘ or ‘]’ in the name?

Anyway: thanks for your quick response and I will be very keen on checking the column names myself from now on

[LeventK]

@Frank_G
The issue is not create a column header with square brackets. In the expression editor, you need to specify a column with the square brackets: [ColumnName]. This does not mean that the actual column name is set as [ColumnName]. What @Pratyay_Rakshit talking about is the expression spell checking in the Expression Builder.

[Steve]

Yes, the parser is flawed. This interpretation is correct:

Pratyay_Rakshit:

Shiftdate] here is interpreted by Appsheet as a block of text called ShiftDate] rather than a column value.