Performance Tuning: Is appsheet reading all t...

Colin1
Participant V

Performance Tuning: Is appsheet reading all the data in each worksheet

Tony mentioned in Office Hours on 8 February 2018 that when Appsheet opens a spreadsheet, it is reading all the worksheet tabs that are inside it, regardless of whether they are added as tables or not. For those worksheets that are not added as tables, does that mean appsheet is reading all the columns and rows in that unused worksheet regardless?

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Hi @Colin yes, for most cloud providers the whole file needs to be read to obtain the tables that are part of the app. If you have significantly large sheets in the workbook that are not part of the app and can live as a separate file altogether, itโ€™s better to break the workbook apart.

In my app Iโ€™ve needed to add several sheets to do some background calculations. And, for reasons I wonโ€™t try to explain here, I canโ€™t put the sheets in a separate workbook. Fortunately, the presence of the sheets that are not used directly in my app doesnโ€™t seem to have slowed it down too much yet.

I would expect that while the app needs to load the entire spreadsheet, it only needs to process those worksheets it actually uses. So extra worksheets mean extra data transfer, but not much extra computation.

Thanks! Do you think I should I use a security filter or anything to keep the burden on the app as light as possible? Or, is the fact that the sheets are not official part of the app good enough?

I should clarify my previous statement: the app on the userโ€™s device doesnโ€™t interact with the spreadsheet file at all, I expect; itโ€™s the app components that exist on the AppSheet servers that do. I would expect a spreadsheet with extra worksheets would have virtually no impact at all on the performance of app on the userโ€™s device.

I suspect you neednโ€™t worry about any performance impact from extra worksheets in your workbook.

Great news! Thanks!

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