User Closing Browser before Changes Save

[Jordan_Davis1]

If a user finishes a form and closes the browser window before their input gets written to the sheet, the changes won’t get saved until the user opens the app again. This leads to me thinking they haven’t completed a form even though they have.

Is there any workaround for this?

[Steve]

Nope.

[GreenFlux]

If you turn off delayed sync, the app will start to sync as soon as the user finished the form and clicks save.

This won’t prevent the user from quickly closing the tab after clicking save, but it will present them with the “Saving Changes” and “Syncing the App” progress bars. That should make it clear to most users that the changes are still uploading, and keep them from closing it too quickly.

Unfortunately, this is an app-wide setting that can get pretty annoying in other parts of your app, so it may cause more problems than it’s worth.

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You could also experiment with a Form-Save action that forces a sync. I’m not sure if that would work, but it’s worth a try.

See last line for forced sync:

help.appsheet.com

App Column Type (Deep Link)

Learn how to use deep links to navigate to another view in the same app, or in another app.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

GreenFlux:

You could also experiment with a Form-Save action that forces a sync. I’m not sure if that would work, but it’s worth a try.

This should be the best available solutions. Once the form is saved, then hire the action to bring back to the detail view, using deeplink expression, where we force sync using =at params. I do have some app do the same.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Maybe we localize the “sync” statement, saying something like “Syncing app. Dont close the app until we finish sync, otherwise we may lose your data” kinda of cautional message to let the app user stay on the app?

[Jordan_Davis1]

Thanks for the suggestions. I try to veer away from syncing after save because my app will take 60 seconds to sync sometimes (six tables, one of which has 40K rows, i’m not using any virtual columns except for ref_rows columns). My users have multiple forms to fill out, sometimes ten so syncing everytime would be inconvenient.

What could work is something like the refresh button at the top right, to manually sync an app. Is it possible to create an action that does that? Although I could just tell them to press the sync button, they’re more likely to remember if there’s an action button that says ‘Save All Changes’.