Ref column names

[Oleg_Romanenko]

Hello! I have a table where I store information about all of the books in my store.
Then I have a table for sales. The Sales table references the Books table.

The problem is that when I reference the Book table it puts the ID of the Book in the BookName field in my google sheet table. It works fine in the app, but what about the google sheet, why can’t it just write the name of the book that I am referencing instead of the Book ID?

[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

Hi @Oleg_Romanenko,

From your description it sounds that in the referenced Books table your key column is Book ID and label is Book Name.

The app displays the user friendly label because for the app user, book name ( or label field ) is easier to understand than a typically cryptic Book ID ( key column). In the back end Google sheet the app stores the key column because it uniquely identifies the concerned record for the said book in the Books table.

If you wish to additionally capture the book name in the Books table in the Google sheet, you could create an additional [Books Name] column in the Sales table with a dereference expression in app formula such as [Ref Column Name in Your SalesTable That References Books Table].[Books Name Column Name in Books Table]

You may wish to keep this [Books Name] column in Sales table hidden because the app anyway displays the label name from the reference table.

Just in case you have not, you may wish to refer to following related articles

help.appsheet.com

Dereference Expressions

Use a dereference expression to retrieve a field value from a referenced record.

help.appsheet.com

Row Labels

How to determine which columns are prominently displayed in a view.

[Oleg_Romanenko]

Thank you so much!