+Santiago Uribe Montoya [AppSheet] +Praveen S...

[Levent_KULACOGL]

@Santiago @praveen @tony Will SPEC (may be at a later stage) could give us kinda flexibility to easily create app views/tables etc. directly from the spreadsheet using JSON headers?

[tony1]

@Levent_KULACOGLU Can you say more? I don’t quite understand. We’re working on allowing you to pull in data from your cloud data provider, if that’s what you mean.

[Levent_KULACOGL]

@tony I’m talking about appending JSON descriptive headers to the spreadsheet columns and changing its type qualifier without a need to regenerate the column structure. For example: I might have a client who desires to add his own forms to the app as per his needs in the future, and I can just give him a provisional table where he can choose the type of the columns/fields he want to use and then I can append those as JSON header to the sheet and when he syncs the app, voila! the form is ready to use

For example, a JSON header like this: AppSheet:{“Description”:“Expected due date:”,“IsRequired”:false,“Type”:“Date”}

[Levent_KULACOGL]

@Bellave_Jayaram what you have mentioned is another approach for sure. I also think that it might be very much beneficial provided we can have the flexibiliy of export/import app structure as JSON for example. I can count many use cases here.

[Bellave_Jayaram]

@Levent_KULACOGLU I am not sure what segment of the AppSheet user base SPEC is intended for. I believe that users of different skill levels will need slightly different things. I don’t think most users would care to export an app definition. However, I think advanced users will find it useful to manage many tables, views, slices, actions, workflows etc. and also to build (and test and maintain) app structures in a more modular way via a declarative syntax not too different from the SPEC syntax.

[Bellave_Jayaram]

In the same way that the Google forms to AppSheet app interface inserts comments in headers. I believe Levent is asking if we did that either manually or programmatically, could SPEC consume that and auto-update the app without us having to regenerate.

I would actually like it if I could write assertions/statements to a text file and an already existing app could read it and incorporate it into the app.

I am thinking of assertions such as the following:

Table:“TBL” hasColumns 10

TBLCol1 = {“Name”:“A”, “Type”:“Text”,…} TBLCol2 = {“Name”:“B”, “Type”:“Number”,…} … Table:“TBL” hasSlice “TBLSLC1” Slice “TBLCSLC1” includesCols {“A”,“B”,“E”} Slice “TBLCSLC1” hasViews {“List”:“ClientView”,“Detail”:“CV_Detail”,“Form”:“ClientForm”}