New Data Explorer being released for the Appsheet Editor

Data Explorer

Today we are beginning to launch our new data schema explorer, which will let app creators explore their data tables while they are editing them.

Where can I find it?

The data explorer can be found as a tab next to the new examples tab while writing expressions in the expression assistant.

What can I do with it?

The data explorer is there to help you visualize your data as youโ€™re working on your expressions, and make inserting columns into your expressions easier.

First, you can use it to see the names of all of your tables and their associated columns:

Hovering over any column will give you the ability to insert it into your expression where your cursor is in the text field:

Hovering over a ref column will show you what table that ref refers to. The ref can be clicked to persist the connecting line:

For those of you who want more space for writing your expressions, you can now also collapse the entire tab section, either by clicking on a tab thatโ€™s already open or by clicking on the expand/collapse icon in the top-right corner. This will be remembered, so the next time you visit this modal they will remain closed.

You can see me making use of all of these features in my app below:

3X_2_6_26e7c968e6656d9094b013d65b3e261854335deb.gif

We hope that you find this a useful addition, and Iโ€™d love to get your feedback on these changes, what we can improve or what you think youโ€™d like to see added to it. As with many of our new features, I will be rolling it to all of you slowly so you may not see it immediately.

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82 REPLIES 82

Steve
Participant V

Wow! Neat! Unfortunate it takes up so much real estate.

Looks Neat,
@Stefan_Quartemont Looks like I was wrongโ€ฆ

Yes!!! Love it.

This part is a bit annoying though.

Old assistant examples:

new explorer pane:


And if youโ€™re working on changes to the expression assistant, maybe you can move the Save button to the top as well?

Thanks for the feedback on that, Iโ€™ll try to make those have similar scrolling behaviour. As to the save button, one thing I did do is make the expression assistant a consistent size so the Save button shouldnโ€™t jump around - you can also now just close the tabs so you wonโ€™t be waiting for something to load, and itโ€™ll remember that state so if youโ€™re an expert you can just always leave them collapsed. I think weโ€™re still toying with larger changes to the Save behaviour on the Expression Assistant so I donโ€™t want to necessarily change something right now until our UX team has done their research, but I also do think that a more standard location for the Save button should be towards the top.

Once we select REF type column, we are able to get the referenced tableโ€™s column to construct โ€œDe-refโ€ expression, which is super useful.

It would be find more useful we can construct the De-ref-list in the same way. Once we select the list type with base type - Ref, then we are able to pull the column to contruct [List][Referenced-column] so called โ€œDe-ref-listโ€

Hope this function could be under the scope of your further development.

@Takuya_Miyai

@benhare

Iโ€™m glad you find the ref column linking useful, and it is in the cards to add more linkages like that as a follow up. I want to see how this does and if itโ€™s helping some of the core problems our app creators are having with confusion in the expression assistant (Iโ€™m fairly sure it will, but I want to get some data to back that up first). Thanks for the feedback though itโ€™s much appreciated!

Will get back with more of feedbacks once the new codes to arrive our enterprise account, as it is curently available under the free account for now.

De-ref/de-ref-list is one of the powerful feature under the appsheet to manipulate the data across the different but connected tables. As suggested, it is make appsheet creators (incl. beginners) life easier to give hints to find the related child record to genereate the de-ref-list, when they select the list/basetype/ref type of fields to guide them in more intuitive ways.

Thanks.

I find the decision to accentuate the expression assistant quite fascinating. I was under the impression that Appsheet wanted a large and robust 3rd party ecosystem. Qrew built and maintains a great chrome extension that has the schema, views, and makes the expression editor better, it even has popups to automatically insert field names as you type.

So, why spend the Appsheet resources on this?

Honestly interested to understand. This is the first thing that Iโ€™ve seen pop up that directly competes with a 3rd party tool.

Hello Grant, so Iโ€™ve actually been working directly with the author of the extension to make sure that the Toolbox works with this new functionality, and it really is a great tool. But also many (most) new creators begin using AppSheet without installing this extension, and for them the expression assistant is a frequent source of confusion, and frankly where we lose a lot of them. So it really was not the design of this functionality to compete with the tool, but try to transpose some functionality to make it available for all of our users.

10-4

Sโ€™il vous plaรฎt
But either I didnโ€™t understand what it was about, or something wrong on my computer
I`m see only arrow near Examples, which hides or shows all tabs
Fig1


Fig2

No tab`s

Itโ€™s being rolled-out over time. You should see it in a few days, assuming all goes well as the roll-out progresses.

Hi @benhare,

Can you please change the columns between tables that span multiple hierarchies so that they are populated with expressions connected by de-reference?

For example, in the following case, Company[Phone] is currently populated, but my expectation is [People].[Company].[Phone].

Example.
Create a VC called Company Phone in the Activity table with the following table structure

3X_c_5_c5deae378498d2ad124617df593d155591dfe1fc.gif

Thanks,

FYI
@tsuji_koichi

Nested de-references are trickier, and are less broadly used (especially by new users) but if it increases the value of this feature for more experienced users like you then I can give it a try.

Thanks @benhare

Considering the strength of AppSheet, which allows for the free use of tables and columns where relationships have not been established, the current specification of Data Explorer is understandable.

So, I thought it would be good to have a different mode that we can call Data column tracer.
Instead of displaying all the tables, this mode allows we to traverse the relevant tables from the table that started the Expression Assistant, and add the column beyond that as a de-reference.

Iโ€™m thinking of the following behavior.


โ†“

โ†“

I hope you find it helpful.
Thanks

Thatโ€™s a neat idea, asking our UX designer about this/some other changes. For large changes to this feature Iโ€™m going to let this sit for a bit and let it gather data (weโ€™re collecting usage data here so we can make good product decisions), but there will be more iterations of the tool.

Also just mentioning that Iโ€™m listening to feedback - youโ€™ll notice in release notes from today that 2 new changes (from this thread, at least in part) are going out. One is helping with scrolling as @Marc_Dillon pointed out, it should scroll independently. The other is adding in the ref lines for other ref-like columns (lists of refs, enums that are refs, enumlists of refs, and lists of enums that are refs). Inserting directly across these other kinds of refs to come soon.

Hi @benhare

Thanks for reviewing my feedback.
Yes, I think itโ€™s great that AppSheet will consider whether this is really a necessary feature for many app creators.
This is my opinion and I hope you will find it helpful.

I think Iโ€™m going to like this feature, and Iโ€™ll be sure to check out the fixes youโ€™ve given me and the release notes in the future.

Thanks,

Derick_Paula
Participant III

This is one of the best additions hands down.

Thanks for the comment, Iโ€™m so happy youโ€™re liking it!

@benhare - love this new capability as it prevents a lot of โ€œbouncingโ€ back and forth to confirm column names across tables. Nice!

One thing I found odd while playing with Data Explorer was the location of the expression box window expansion. The Data explorer windows have min/max resize nicely along the top of the window, but the Expression window is way down under the expression notes and very easy to miss. Seems oddly placed in my opinion.

Glad youโ€™re liking it! And hmm, I can kind of see what you mean - for me, the original design of this had no button, but clicking on the tab that was opened closed it (that part still works too), so I guess I found this an improvement. Where would you put it do you think then? To the left of Examples? (To be clear - still going to want to clear any change here with the UX designer for the project but Iโ€™m curious).

Since you have it at the right for the data explorer, makes sense to be consistent and have to the right (under the black edit window? See yellow arrow. Maybe to the right of โ€œsnipโ€?

Leave that to UI designers. Just found this too easy to miss where it is right now.

Hello Mike, so the problem with aligning it with snip (at least by default) is that snip is something that comes with Appsheet Toolbox, and while I love that extension (and use it myself), many of our users donโ€™t have it, so itโ€™d have to go somewhere else or at least not be in position related to it. Also sorry I missed your yellow arrow in the first post, you were showing me where you wanted it to be already so I guess I didnโ€™t need to ask.

Thanks @benhare.
*caution: the below is just one persons opinionโ€ฆ

With the introduction of the Data Explorer, I would consider having three โ€œtabsโ€ under the black expression window:
Data Explorer | Expression Results | Syntax Examples

Data Explorer would be the default tab.

Donโ€™t want to lose the syntax examples as new users really need this (including me as a reminder). I just wish the help articles were easier to get to directly from the syntax (which is why I use Appsheet Toolbox as well).

As for the expand black window control, I would put that far right under the window (like most window expansion controls). Not sure how that impacts Appsheet Toolbox but I am sure that could be discussed with them. Default for far right position should be native Appsheet as a priority and add ins build around that.

These are just my opinions and I am sure the UI team has a view here and user preference testing would be considered.

Hope that helps.

Since Examples and Data Explorer are now tabs, why not also move the expression explanation into a tab and get it out of the way? As an experienced app creator, both the examples and the explanation are useless to me, so I donโ€™t really want them there at all, but data explorer is of great interest to me.

I agree,
Default to data explorerโ€ฆ Hide the restโ€ฆ
I wish test was better, and Insitu.

@Steve and @Grant_Stead, those are good suggestions. Weโ€™re currently working on broader updates to the expression assistant so Iโ€™ll try to take some of that in advisement as we make them.

When is this supposed to come available? I donโ€™t seem to have access to this feature yet.

The rollout was delayed, but should be resuming soon. I, too, do not yet have this feature!

Many more people should be receiving it today, but yes as Steve mentioned it was delayed for a while.

SkrOYC
Participant V

Came late to the party, Iโ€™m really busy right now so havenโ€™t answered any on the community lately.
At first I though AppSheet Trainingโ€™s extention (AKA Qrew Tools Extention) was messing up with this but I can confirm I just havenโ€™t received the funtion just yet to try it.
Actually, Iโ€™m just more worried about the ability to have autocompletion instead of a mouse-driven thing like this Data Explorer (since I think more advance users use the mouse just for those cases were keyboard doesnโ€™t make sense anymore)
I know this will help a lot of people though, so Iโ€™m glad that there is people working on this kind of solutions.
Also, I would like to see more keyboard-driven interactions for the editor. I find that the community page has more keyboard shortcuts and the kind than the editor wich is the place where we spend most of our time.
Anyway, thanks again for the hard work

Amen!

Do you have it yet? Itโ€™s not ton my paid account.

Iโ€™m glad that you like it so far, and there are other improvements on the horizon for the expression assistant that I hope will make the experience better too. The keyboard-driven interaction thing is interesting to hear, and Iโ€™d love to get some opinions on what key-bindings would be helpful but I think we should use a different thread for that.

Also @Lucinda_Mason itโ€™s still rolling out - Iโ€™m investigating a small issue that was reported with it today, hope to continue to roll it out tomorrow.

Thanks @benhare
Iโ€™ll be waiting for that post in order to give there my opinion.
Anyway, the best approach will always be full custom shortcuts, since keyboards are different and we use different OSes. Sometimes simple keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+S to save just doesnโ€™t work on Linux or Windows because it thinks we want to save the webpage while on MacOS Cmd+S does the job.
So, custom key-bingings all day

Hi! Iโ€™m coming late to this discussion. Improvement of the editing interface is very important in my view so this feature is very welcome.

Because the editor interface is an important topic, the #editor tag has been established for this forum but is underused. I would appreciate it if โ€œeditorโ€ could be added to โ€œexpressionโ€ (the only tag for this article at the moment).

Thatโ€™s a good point - Iโ€™ll add it to my similar posts in the future (for this one it seems someone has updated the post with that before I was able to get around to it).