Sorting Dependent Dropdowns BUG?

[Jonathan_S]

Hey All,

Im having trouble sorting independent drop downs. I have all the dependent drop down functionality working for long time now, but the users want it sorted. Understandable.

Problem is, when I sort, it seems to break the dependent drop down. This is fine for the first column, but for the second column which is based on the first, when sorting either the first or second columns seems to break it and the drop down will display everything…

in the valid if for each column i have the following. This has worked for months…
Column A: Types[Customer]
Column B Types[Flavor]

Problem is, when I change them to this
Column A: Sort(Types[Customer])
Column B Types[Flavor]

or this
Column A: Types[Customer]
Column B Sort(Types[Flavor])

or this
Column A: Sort(Types[Customer])
Column B Sort(Types[Flavor])

The dependent drop down breaks. But it is sorted

I feel like I’m missing something.

Any Feedback?

Thanks,

[Austin]

You could try specifically creating the dependent drop down instead of using appsheet “intelligent” drop down. So depending on if you can select either first or one then the other adjust accordingly but
Column A:Types[Customer]
Column B:SELECT(Types[Flavor], [Customer]=[_THISROW].[Customer])

[Jonathan_S]

Ok, But I have some forms that have 8 drop downs all dependent of each other.

Customer, Flavor, Organic/Convention/Gf, Pallet Patterns, all coming from 1 main Data Base, that would seem extremely tedious when getting to the 8th Column? performance?

[Austin]

No idea on how to help with that. I know I’ve had problems with sort before and haven’t found a solution. Depending on how you need them sorted, attempting to sort the table by the best method to get the best sort in app can be a minor solution (ie sort by Customer then Flavor then Organic etc. in your main table)

[Jonathan_S]

Super Frustrating. Its so simple I want to just get this finished now. But I guess it isn’t

[Jonathan_S]

Are there any other way to do this while keeping the appsheet intelligent dropdown? why does sorting break this? Is this a Bug??

[Steve]

I don’t think this is a bug. Dependent dropdowns are based on direct column references (e.g., Types[Customer]). As soon as an expression is introduced, even something as simple as sorting, the dependency logic would have to be able to interpret the expression and figure out what the base column is. For some expressions, this could be difficult or even impossible. In all likelihood, the decision was made to handle the simplest case.

@Austin_Lambeth’s suggestion to add your own expressions to reproduce the dependent dropdown functionality is the right work-around.

[Austin]

The expressions would be very tedious to make but wouldn’t require changing unless you added another column. If you can reduce the dependency of one column on all the other columns you can also reduce the expressions. As far as performance, I’ve never really seen too much of a performance hit and I have tables with multiple columns with expressions nearing 100 lines. There’s only certain formulas that seem to actually hit hard and selects don’t seem to be one.