Office Hours 10/1/2019

[peterdykstra]

Good morning! We’re restarting AppSheet Office Hours today and will start hosting a Q&A webinar every two weeks now, assuming everyone is finding it useful! To participate in future sessions, or receive a recording of today’s session, register here.

Today’s agenda includes:

• OCR Examples
• New Action: Add Rows to Other Tables
• App UX Style Updates
• Live Q&A

The top priority of office hours is to hear your questions about these new features, and anything else you’re working on in AppSheet - please share your questions below and we’ll try to address as many as possible during the hour!

[1minManager]

I read ealier that Appsheet might support continous GPS monitoring. Can you tell us more?

[rshah1]

Can we set up a view specific for Landscape orientation or specific for use in browser?

[Daisy_Ramirez]

OCR: Is it possible to scan line item data - for example as in a receipt where you have multiple line items

[Eli2]

OCR: Different patterns based on previous entry?

Ex.I have data labels, which differ based on manufacturer… can we set a branching set of OCR Models, based on the input manufacturer?

[Eli2]

Makes Sense! Thanks!

[Enable_Digital]

We have hundreds of users for our Appsheet apps who are based in Africa and many of them report issues with logging into the apps. It seems that the connection is timing out. One user tried opening the same app on the same phone and was not able to do so in Africa while there were no issues in Europe. Would it be possible for you to get some servers apart from the US and closer to Africa? (if you’re using Azure cloud, we checked they have servers in South Africa and middle East)

[peterdykstra]

Thanks for this feedback and sharing your situation - we’re forwarding on to the team for ideas, but in the meantime, can you share a bit more about what types of devices and data the app users in Africa are trying to access? There may be other ways to resolve as well - if any information is sensitive, please send to support@appsheet.com

[Enable_Digital]

Thanks Peter! We’re using a postgresql database as a data source (so also as we tested partitioning by dividing data into views in the db to improve the load time, it doesn’t work very well as it doesn’t allow to save new data - maybe you have any other suggestions there?). Most of the users are using mobile phones and it seems this is causing most trouble, loading from the computer seems to work better.

[rshah1]

Within a form, I want a user to enter multiples values for one field can it be done?
Example:
User needs to enter a list of items(one or more) belonging to a category.
(I don’t know the items for categories, so I can not do dropdown and enable add new.)

[Bahbus]

@rshah It kinda can be done. I have a similar thing set up but they can be tricky. Look at EnumList.

[rshah1]

Thank you. Can you share a document so I can review it?

[rshah1]

@Peter, Can I save the selected options as a separate row in the table?

[Phuong]

You can set up “Add a Row to a Table” actions to separate out these selected options and add them as separate rows in a table. Although, the limitation would be that the number of actions you set up would have to match up with the number of items users selected.

[rshah1]

@Phuong
Thank you for your response

Is there a way I can count on-the-fly the number of options selected by the user and then use it to run “Add a Row to a Table” action?

Let’s say, the user always selects a fixed number of options. Is there a sample app that I can look under the hoop on how to set up “Add a Row to a Table” action for that many number of times, that adds a new row in the table for each option selected?

[Phuong]

You can count the number of options selected on the fly, but you’d need to have these actions already made. We’re currently in the process of creating a sample app with the “Add a Row to a Table” feature. In the meantime, please follow the steps in this Community post to implement the action:

Action: Add a Row to a Table Tips & Tricks 💡

Actions are manual ways of interacting with your data, allowing app users to visit a URL, start a phone call, see a location on a map. Actions also allow for quick data changes, or creating a new row of data in the data table for which the Action is associated. Until Praveen’s recent feature announcement, it was not possible to use an Action to add a row of data to a different table. Now, by creating a new Action and specifying which separate table data should be added to, and defining each col…

Although, you can implement your ask by creating multiple “Add a Row to a Table” actions and adding a “Grouped: execute a sequence of actions” action to execute all of your actions.

[Paul_Lou_M_palo]

I need to connect to Ebay’s API to upload pictures to eBay from an App , can you tell me the best way to do this ?

[Phuong]

Thank you for joining the webinar today! You can integrate AppSheet with other platform by using our Webhook capability: https://help.appsheet.com/en/articles/962006-introduction-to-webhooks.

[Daisy_Ramirez]

In Publisher Pro, is it possible to track the number of times a view has been opened or clicked on? Same type of action you just demonstrated?

[Phuong]

Hi @Daisy_Ramirez,

Hope you enjoyed the webinar session today! We currently are developing this level of analytics for our Business Subscription at the moment and understand that it would be really helpful to app creators. We’ll be sure to forward this along to product and keep you updated if we do provide it for the Pro plan as well. Thank you for the feedback.

[Fabian_Weller]

@rshah You can find some sample Apps in this Post:

New Action: Add a Row to a table Announcements

We just added an initial version of a new action ‘Data: add a new row to another table using values from this row’ Please try it and give us feedback. Documentation, etc coming later this week. The brief version is here: let’s consider an example with Orders and OrderDetails as two related tables in an app. Add an action ‘CreateChildRow’ to the Orders table that will add a row to the OrderDetails table. You can specify expressions to assign to each column of this row. For example: Order = [O…

[Thomas_Varghese]

Can you please send the link of the recording of this session of office hour in community. I wasn’t able to attend
Thanks

[Mauricio_Bick]

When will the recording be available? I wasn’t able to join in.

Thank you.

[Mauricio_Bick]

Got this notification but can’t see the recording. Is any else having the issue?

[Fabian_Weller]

Same Thing here.

[jcadence]

Hi everyone! We’ve added Tuesday’s video to this thread for reference. Please let us know if you have difficulty viewing the content.

Happy app building!

[Henry_Scott]

Could not find the Video in the thread

[peterdykstra]

The recording should be embedded in the original post above - let us know if you have trouble accessing.

[Francios]

No problem accessing the recording.

[Fabian_Weller]

@Peter I can’t see the “Preview as User”. Is this only for Business Plan?

[Bellave_Jayaram]

Yes, I can confirm this is only for apps that are in a Business Plan. Even if such an app is shared with you as co-author and you don’t have a Business Plan, you cannot see it.

[peterdykstra]

Sorry for the confusion @Fabian - if you’d like any other details/demo of that feature, just let me know.