Q/A from AppSheet Automation Office Hours on 04/14/2021

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As a follow up to the office hours conducted on 04/14/2021 we have summarized the questions we received during the office hours and are posting them with answers here so everyone can benefit from them.

  • Q: HI I notice the size of the PDF in the workflow was impacted Potrait versus Landscape.

Seems like a related issue to this on the community regarding this.

  • Q: Would you please restate what kinds of documents can trigger bots?

Invoices, Receipts & W9 docs currently.

  • Q: Is there an specific format for Invoices / Receipts that is supported? What kind of interactions are supported with those types of documents?

AppSheet leverages Google Cloud Document AI for invoice/receipt processing. You can find more details for them here. There are two major features that we are providing through document processing:

  1. Auto extraction of structured data from these documents into pre-baked tables (schema) for Invoices, Receipts & W9 documents in AppSheet. Views can be built to visualize data etc
  2. Triggering of Bots that can execute a process
  • Q: Is AppSheet a good product to use for automated document creation (given a standardized template and customer information, create a Google Doc)?

You can create documents from standardized templates. Currently we support CSV, HTML, JSON, PDF & XML documents. Please check out the Create a File task. In the future you will be able to invoke AppsScript functions directly from AppSheet. Your AppsScript can contain code to generate various types of Google documents such as Docs, Slides, Sheet etc.

  • Q: Can AppSheet automatically generate DataStudios graphs and share that more robust data report via email?

Not currently. But AppSheet can write data to many data-sources that Data Studio can build reports against. We are exploring options on how we can offer seamless integration with Data Studio in the future.

  • Can App Automation create GDrive files ?

Yes, this can be done via the Create a File task in a process.

  • Is Box.com in the pipeline as a document source?

Currently we only support Google Drive as a document source. We may look at it in the future based on customer demand.

  • Q: Do you have examples of IoT with AppSheet? Can I connect data from Raspberry feed it to Google Sheets and show in an AppSheet app?

Yes, once data is in Sheets, you can create an app directly from the sheet and show that data in different kinds of views. Please check out this article.

  • Q: Does AppsSheet support multi upload images function?

Not currently.

  • Q: Will we be having automations that will allow us to trigger an appscript function that is bound to the underlying GoogleSheet?

Yes thatโ€™s in our future roadmap.

  • Q: can a bot trigger some action between two apps?

Yes, currently thatโ€™s supported through the Webook Task. In order for that to work you need to have a bot in the 2nd app that is listening for a data change event and the webhook task from bot in the 1st app can invoke the AppSheet API and invoke the data change action

  • Q: How to submit multiple clients webhook submission and get seperate responses of each

We donโ€™t support processing responses from webhooks. You can make one way sync or async calls to webhooks.

  • Q: I canโ€™t create bot a add bot which add data into a table based on a schedule. (Example case: Add every month automalically the expense โ€œrentโ€ and its price into an expensive tracker app)
  • Q: Will such a feature be supported?

Today it can be done by creating two processes:

  1. Process 1
    a) Pick โ€œNoneโ€ for the Entity value.
    b) This process has a call process step and it calls process
  2. Process 2
    a) Pick your table name (the one you want to update) as the entity value.
    b) This process has a step/task (data action) to add data to this table
  3. Create a Bot with an event of type โ€œScheduledโ€, the bot calls Process 1
    In future we plan to provide a simpler user experience that involves only one process.
  • Q: Hi, Is it, or will be possible to copy some data from two table into one? Thank you

We currently support data copied from one table to another.

  • Q: Will there be any change on how errors/bugs/breaks in the programming of bots are shown? What kind of debugging is supported?

The monitoring app (accessible from the โ€œMonitorโ€ button on the bot) provide high level metrics and details on bot runs. The bot run tab will show details on each execution of the bot, including the data it received, steps it executed etc.

  • Q: In Format Rules-> Visual Format โ†’ Icon, is there a way to place the icon to the right of the text?

No

  • Q: In our Hotel Revenue Management AppSheet app โ€œPrismโ€, we give access to various Hotel Revenue Managers to their Hotel data only.The Revenue managers can choose their respective properties (in case they have access to more than 1 property), by going to a selector list (of properties).However, we have been noticing that the property selector list is malfunctioning i.e. automatically some other property gets selected and the data for that property starts showing up on the AppSheet dashboards (even ones which the user doesnโ€™t have access), pls advise.

Itโ€™s not possible for us to determine if this is a bug or if you havenโ€™t properly set up the app based on this information. Iโ€™d recommend posting on our community website or if you think itโ€™s a bug, submitting a support ticket (support@appsheet.com). Iโ€™d also encourage you to look at security filters in our documentation to avoid users seeing information they are not supposed to have access to.

Thanks for attending the office hours and please keep your questions coming.

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