Reimporting recovered data

[Jethro]

Hi All,

Does anyone have an easy way of reimporting data into their database/spreadsheet after retrieving in recovery mode? I have had to do the following which is quite a lot when 5 devices fail with hundreds of records:

1. Capture all recovery data - 100s of separate text files with JSON format

2. Merge all text files into a single file

3. Convert into csv / excel file

4. Clean data - it has some additional system variables and altered column names and because of 1 to N tables it also has duplicate records

5. Append to an import template

6. Append to database table - tables in my case as I have multiple.

I am assuming this is the only way and that recovery mode is more geared toward debugging than actually recovering your data for appending. Any tips welcome.

thanks

[MultiTech]

Unfortunately, that is the workflow.

After going through what you are now, my team and I tightened up our version release schedule so we can get 100% compliance; we let users know a week before any updates are made, and I take extra care to look at the audit history to see what activity is happening before I release.

After a particularly troublesome update, where we had hundreds of records to try and recover, the data team decided to scrap the effort and instead require the users that submitted the records to re-submit them again. (Luckily, data they were entering were stored elsewhere so they could simply repeat the process; but they weren’t too happy about having to do that.)

On a side note, only modifications to the data schema - the column structure - will cause an issue like this; update where you’re just changing formulas, views, slices, or anything inside appsheet are fine, it’s only changes to the columns that will cause breaks like this.

[Jethro]

Thanks for your reply. I am indeed going through this painful process. We submit 3,500 records a day and now 5 devices failed with the following error:

"This change cannot be applied because there is a newer version of your app…"

The last update I did (checked in version history) was to remove some columns from the slice. However the columns still remain in the tables unaltered. Unfortunately the team gets paid on submitted data which means if they reset, the data is lost, and so is their paid work

I agree about tightning up releases. Its tempting to quickly change a formula or adapt a slice, but with a 180 devices, any error has an exponential impact.

I really appreciate you sharing your experience. It would be great if Appsheet would take a better look at the way recovery data is formatted. Its not really a recovery if it is too complicated to actually restore. It should be called - data debug mode