Make your AppSheet app Faster - Linking Multiple Small Apps Together

all right well we should be live now so glad of all of you to join us uh i'm your host my name is clark james i am joined with uh the most magnificent man alive uh mr cj pie uh great buddy of mine he's gonna do a great job today um and i'm gonna go ahead and jump right in we've got a lot to cover today i know that a lot of you are looking forward to this so we're going to skip through this as fast possible if you haven't checked out our toolbox please do so but as you probably saw from the email i sent out or if you saw it in the title on the youtube uh we're going to be making our app sheet apps faster today we're going to be linking multiple apps together um using an app launcher using some link to views it's going to be great um so here's some bullet points for today's demo the most important one being the the last one as well as the parrot gif um i feel like those are pretty crucial to what we're doing would you agree cj absolutely essential absolutely essential so without further ado i'm going to go ahead and hand it over i would like to give cj as much time as possible and allow you guys to ask as many questions as possible because i'm sure there will be a bunch so if you have any questions feel free to post them in the youtube chat just know if they're not pertaining to what cj's currently doing i may hold off on uh allowing him to answer that question so that way he stays on track but just know that i am watching the comments so cj you should be good to share your screen perfect everybody glad to be with you today let me get the uh screen share going i am prohibited from screen sharing unfortunately but clark will every time without fail every time it's okay we'll get it up go ahead all right that is looking much better okay score share screen two you guys should be seeing a uh an app editor right now is that is that correct clark yes that is correct i can see your app editor perfect cool well as clark introduced we're going to take a look at kind of linking multiple smaller apps together to give us some advantages as far as speed and performance goes um and if you were if you were with us the last time i did a webinar um the topic i did was about using app menus and link to view expressions to kind of lay out your app in a kind of a menu that you see right at the beginning and you just kind of click through whatever view you want to go to right there from your your home screen kind of like you see in this editor i have up right now and so we had kind of covered that um last time i was here and so this is a little bit of a continuation of some of those ideas and using uh some of the same concepts but now between apps so it's expanding a little bit um so as we get started um i just want to talk a little bit about why might you want to link multiple apps together and why would you want to have multiple smaller apps instead of one bigger app um and as i thought about this i kinda wanna give you guys a heuristic or a guideline of like okay how do i know when i want multiple apps or when should it just be one app and there's no like absolute hard and fast answer but the kind of the phrase i came up with is if you have distinct end users right so you have different people using the apps and they have different processes that they do for the most part um then it might make sense to have multiple apps just in the first place and then the big one is what we already mentioned before the more data that you are pulling into a single application so the more tables that you have the more rows they're in those tables um the more virtual columns you have running the more behaviors that you have running on the server or even on the client right the more actions you have the slower your app is going to run right and so you may hit a point if you have a big app where it's just so slow all the sync times are you know 10 seconds 20 seconds 30 seconds and that is kind of miserable so if that's you it might make sense to see if there is some distinct functions in your app but you could split into two or maybe even three smaller apps and just link between them with kind of some of the techniques we're going to talk about today because then each app is only running off of a smaller subset of data so that's a little bit about the why and for our kind of demo use case today a really common um kind of use case in the while that you'll see is with crm so this is my demo crm app um and the reason why the crm app makes sense is because usually the crm is for tracking customers right so you've got customer records in here um your your have maybe lead info right so for potential customers that's what this view would be maybe you're handling payments in your crm app etc etc so you might have a whole bunch of kind of internal business stuff going on in your crm app and lots of associated data data tables and then you might have a part of your business that is more in the field and so the app we're going to be linking to is this uh demo field inspection app so a notification at the bottom cj is pretty funny uh you haven't started watching this uh hey this is webinar this is where we're live right now yes sorry i'll clear that off the screen but uh we are live if you didn't know um so yeah so this would be an inspection app so say so my kind of made up use case is you are really good at inspecting buildings your company is and uh you know you you do inspections right so here are all my inspections um that i can do i've got you know there's a foundation free of cracks et cetera et cetera and and that's something your company does for your customers right and so you have this application for your your field text to actually perform the inspections right but that's kind of separate and not involved with the crm part of it or the managing the customer data and so um we might want those to be separate apps so obviously every crm is different every business is different but this is kind of my made up use case so the idea would be that let's just say you're connected with another system or something and you get requests there are none right now but we'll add one later you get a request for an inspection in your crm app right from your clients and then we want to take that request and we want to have it in the inspections app so that our field inspectors can perform the inspection based on the information that we've received through the crm app and so that's kind of the the practical integration between the two applications but um kind of the main focus of the the functionality is actually going to be see if i can move this out of the way here is um linking between the two apps and the first kind of entry point for that rather than uh having two separate apps that we kind of have to manage it often makes sense to have a third app that is actually only an app launcher right so the app that we're going to build to start here is a very very simple app that's just going to let us choose which of our other apps we want to go to okay but what this means is that you don't have to send everyone in your company two separate app links right you can just send them the one app launcher app and then they have access to all the apps in your ecosystem so that's what we're going to build i already kind of started building out the table it's just going to be one table which is called this app launcher table and we're just going to use this to link to our two individual apps so um i've put a view name the name of the app that's going to link to spot for an icon some text and then just a column to order um which apps come first if i want to customize that so let's go over here and spin up a new app really quick and we'll call it demo app launcher and we're going to select that google sheet that i just mentioned and let it do its thing so hopefully all that made sense so far i know there's a little bit of a lot of setup but we're getting into it now um and hopefully this gets the creative juices flowing for you guys in your own your own business world all right looks like we are almost there perfect so well there's only one table in that google sheet so that is the one table that it set it up with so we will um go ahead and customize this view you can use a card view or a gallery view so if you recall from the webinar i did on the app menus part this is going to be a little bit of a recap of that but you can use a card view and a gallery view because both of those allow you to put a custom action in here which will be our link to view action so i'm going to use a gallery view for this one just because that's what i usually use i'm going to sort by that display order column that i mentioned um i'm just gonna give it a uh home icon to make it look nice heart with home because we love home home is where the heart is right perfect i'm going to save that progress really quick and then i'm just going to uh use the add action that app sheet creates automatically for us to add some entries and so the first entry is going to be our first app this will be our demo well let's call it crmat actually this is going to be the name of the view we want to link to so if we go to our crm app the name of this view is called app menu so the way that i have this set up is here goes the view name that we're linking to in the app that we're linking to and then the app name um actually needs to be a part of the url or the easiest place to grab it from is in the url so this little thing right here demo crm app dash some number that's the unique id for your app sheet app and every app sheet app has one of these and so you can find it right there in the url and there's some other places in the editor that you can see it for instance the uh the links section i believe should have this url somewhere in here nope i'm completely lying to you it does not have the url but uh you can pull it from the url go ahead clark um just clarify if you are having trouble finding out which one it is you'll see this one is similar it's everything after that equals sign and uh yep so it'll say app name equals and everything kind of after the app name yeah so it's what it usually is it's usually your the title of your app and then followed by six numeric keys uh but just to clarify perfect so i've pasted it in here into our app name section and then i've already downloaded some icons and this is crm so what did i have for crm i think i had a folder yeah folder with a person on it and then subheader let's see company crm app just to keep it simple i misspelled company display order one and then we'll save it so this should be saving to our app launcher table remove this next okay there it goes saved it to our google sheet and there it is app menu now we can't see it because i chose a white icon but this is all light theme so let's dark theme it because dark theme is better anyway and now it should show up for us and then i'm just going to rinse and repeat so app menu is there now i'm going to add i'm actually going to update what that will say so that it displays something else so we're going to add a display name so view name this will be for our field inspection app it's called home it's the starting view for this one so home we'll go here and then i need to grab the url or the app name for this guy and then go grab my icon for this guy and this one is yes the note subheader field inspection app display order will be two so save him in there so what i was saying a second ago i kind of was bundling there is all that i actually included when i first made this table was a view name and an app name and so we're using this to link to the view in the other app and then using the app name to know which app we're linking to but i don't really want to display the names of the views and the apps that i'm linking to i want to display the the name of the app not the name of the views so let's add a a display column in here that we can display um so it looks a little bit nicer for us so we'll call this um display app name and then um i'll just doctor it here crm app and inspections app okay so i updated my table structure so i'm going to have to regenerate the schema here [Music] and then it should resync and we can configure our view to show us the app names instead of the view names and then we'll add in our a link to view action that will also link to these other apps so i'm going to go to our app launcher view and let's see let's see position center that's good and image size so you can also change the image size customize to your liking and we'll stick with medium um let's see let's change this to a card view so that we can customize what we see here so for our primary title let's do the display app name and then subheader yeah that looks a lot better so we just switched it to a card view and i put it on the list type um so that i could kind of customize the the text that it displays but that's looking a lot better so we can see our two apps that we're going to link to and now we just need to create the action to do so so i added a new action and we'll call it link to app and um so you have two options here go to another app sheet app and then go to another view within this app they actually both work um but since we are going to a specific view in the other app sheet app um i'm going to choose go to another view within this app which is kind of counterintuitive and if we choose another app sheet app it might let us link to a specific view but i think it just spits you out on the starting view of the app that you're linking to which would be fine because that's what we're doing anyway but um we're just going to use this to avoid for the sake of time so link to view and then we're just going to use our column values from our table which is going to be a view name and then here we can do app name perfect we don't need this to show so i'm going to set the prominence to do not display and then and the last step that we need to do is we need to go back to our app launcher view and set the on click behavior so we don't want to go to details anymore we actually want this to run our link to app action whenever we select a row from our app launcher table so let's save all that work and if i didn't screw anything up and when we click on one of these rows it should link us to the specified views in the specified app so the crm app should be the starting view for that one i'll make this a little bigger and you can see whenever you link to a separate app it will do that sync function at the beginning and as you can see we land on the app menu view of the crm app so we've created and if i have to refresh this to get back to it but we've created a third app and all that it's doing is linking to other apps right and so again this lets you just have a single app that you can share and you can get to all of your apps right so if i needed to add additional entries into our app launcher table you add more apps that do things you just keep adding them in and your your structure's there you just put the name of the app and the name of the view you're linking to and all the links will work and so i'll illustrate going to the inspections app as well i'll pause let's double check if there's been any questions or anything up to this point and if not we can keep going currently there's no questions on the youtube chat uh however i do have a question for you uh what if uh whenever you go into your crm let's say let's say you did want to so you sent that link to a user so that they could go to the uh you know all of their apps right they could get the app launcher they go to any of the apps what if they wanted to get back to the app launcher is there a way that you could do that yeah absolutely i believe when you actually uh link out it might put a return link in the menu it could be mistaken um but let's double check yeah so whenever you link from one app to another it actually puts a return link in the side menu so i link to the inspections app and i have this demo app launcher link in the menu that i can click on and it'll just take me right back so that's the easy way the next thing that i was going to show everyone is okay cool so we have this single third app that links to all the other apps but what if i'm already in the crm app and i want to link to the inspections app from here instead of right and so how do we kind of integrate these apps further um so that's what we're gonna do and you could use the same principle to link back to the app launcher app so essentially um you'll see that this crm app is using um an app menu so this is what we've done in a previous webinar it should be recorded you can go watch it but we're using this link to view which is very simple link to view link name to link to these various views within the app now all of these views are blank they don't have data in them because i didn't need them for this demo but you can see the layout of the application and the function that it's using and so what we want to do is add a fifth option here to actually just take us to our inspections app right so again let me let me recap a little bit let's say again you get a request in from a customer okay so say thoughtworks is one of your customers and they need an inspection done on building a and cj is going to be the one to do it okay so here's a request so now if i link to our request we've got this one one entry a request for an inspection on building a and i assigned it to cj so the idea here is okay well wouldn't it be great if we can get this to our inspections app because this is a different data table this is the request table this is not our inspections table and then just kind of link to it easily right since we're already working in the app so we added a request and now we're going to kind of flesh out that process of going to the inspections app without using the app launcher so the first thing is i'm just going to add an entry in the menu to link to the inspections app in general so you could just kind of switch between and then we can add one going the other way if we need to um but we might not just for the sake of time but we're going to have to do a little bit of updates just like we did on the app launcher app because you can see i don't have a an app name column in here right because uh this app is only set up to link within itself it wasn't linking out to another app so assume you have these apps already built out and you're adding this in this would kind of be the process so in our app menu table for our crm app we're going to add an app name column that will let us do the same thing we just did on the app launcher [Music] and it will allow us to link to other apps as well as link within the apps so um the cool thing here is that uh we can actually put the name of the app that we're in so in this case the crm app in the app name section and it'll work just fine so every row could have an app name but if it's in the same app then it just links to the same app so i'm just going to take our app id here for our crm app and paste it in for all of these entries or it's not going to work so the app name for all of these views that are intra app they're within the same app is the same it's the crm app and so app sheet can use that expression and it's not going to mess anything up but for the entry that we're about to add which is going to link to the inspections app that name will be different so the view name is home display name is going to be inspections app subheader field inspections app and then we'll use the same icon i haven't really know screen is home display order five i suppose i should have uh we're going to run into an error here because i didn't update the column structure bad bad developer yep there it is so let's regenerate the structure get our app name column in there it's a sleepy thursday guys okay our app name is here so i think it just canceled my oh no it it uh cued it and then saved it except it's all off one so let's cut this and paste it like so and since i have the um link to view action on the selection of the row here um i can't actually click on this to edit it and so i'm gonna use the card view feature where you can hit these three dots and actually edit this row because if i would have clicked on it it would have tried to navigate to that view um and actually let's uh let's sync this so it moves everything over because i moved the columns to the right so if you try to add rows when the column structure is off that's what will happen um it'll all be shifted to the left because it didn't know about app name yet so there you go that's that's freebie okay cool let's edit this and put our app name for our inspections app in here another thing that you'll notice about this is this says ux demo inventory app or as whenever we're in the app here the name is demo field inspection app so this app name or app id is kind of like a stable key and it's going to be the name of the app when you first created it so this app when i first made it was called ux demo inventory app and then i repurposed it for things and renamed it appropriately but this app name didn't change it stays the same as what i named it when i originally created the app so just a heads up that can be confusing all right so let's save that and then we need to modify our link to view expression because right now is only taking a view input and so for refresher on the link to view expression there is an optional second parameter called the app id which is the app name and that's what we've been using but it's optional so we can just give it the view name and it will default to going to the app that you were working in but since we have the possibility of linking out to the inspections app we're going to add app name as our optional second parameter here and save it so now we should have a fifth entry called inspections app and all of these rows in our app menu table um have a an app name right that is now in our link to view expression so whenever we click on one of these it's going to read that app name that's a weird icon that it gave us and linked to the view within that app now since all of these have the app name of the crm app that we're in it's just linking within the app but if we choose the inspections app option it reads that oh this is a different app id and it shoots us over to the inspections app which is this guy all right so but we're on the home screen of the inspections app and then like i said i'll skip this part for for the sake of time but we could do the same thing over here right and add a link in back to the crm app right so in your menu of the inspections app i'm an admin i do more than just do the fuel inspections i want to go back to the crm app you can do that um and then you also have this feature if you've already linked from one app to the other so all different ways you can kind of integrate and be zooming around from view to view in app to app so okay i've got a question i just saw it pop up it's a great stopping point so let me take a look at this my concern is mainly about nested dereference i hope there will be class soon yes what do you mean by nested dereference mayor that's that would be my question to you but i would love to do a class or may not be me we would love to do a class about the references um and all that sort of thing the references are really powerful really fun but if you clarify the question or what you mean by necessity references i'd love to give more feedback on that but i'm glad that you are enjoying the session another segue we are actually hosting boot camps starting next week um i don't think all the spots are filled yet but we do we have one for app sheet proficiency uh which i will be hosting myself and then we also have uh expressions mastery which i believe cameron will be doing uh so those start on tuesday um so if you are interested in those feel free to send me an email or just check out aptcheetraining.com uh there should be a new tab that we just introduced called bootcamps and you can get more information there yeah those are going to be really great i'm really excited for those um but cool so okay so let's just recap we've made a launcher app um that could look a lot better but we won't waste time on tweaking the ux even though it bugs me um that uh can link to our two individual apps so our crm app and our inspections app right and so we could use an app like this um to kind of be our our grand central station right that connects to all of our sub processes and workflows um and different users you know your administrators your your office people your field guys could all have a different app and they could just go to this one app and then select the one that applies to them or something along those lines like i said every um kind of use case is different um but that's the idea so we we created that it took us you know 10 minutes to do and now we've got kind of a working app launcher and then we worked on our intra-app connection a little bit by adding this option in the app menu of the crm app to link to the inspections app from this menu and it's kind of integrated right in with all the other options right so we can go within the app and then seamlessly go to another app using that optional app name parameter in the link to view expression like i alluded to earlier there's kind of one step further that um usually is really helpful and so that's maybe you're not in the you know the main menu of the app you're you're using it right you're in the inner workings obviously this app is very simple for the purposes of the webinar but this is full-fledged app you know you've got lots of views you're you're in the weeds wouldn't it be great is if you get a request in so let's just imagine this is connected to a third-party system boom request comes in and you see it and you say okay well i want to send this to an inspector so wouldn't it be great if i can one copy this to the inspections table which we can do very easily with the behavior action and two just navigate to that record in the inspections app right from here i can go look at it in the inspections app right that specific row and we can do that and so that's kind of the the the crescendo of all this is we can not just go to full views we can go to specific rows specific records in specific views in specific apps right so we can get even more granular with our navigation i'm going to pause to answer this question this all pop up where can i get the icons i have no idea can you guide me absolutely i think that was from gerardo if i'm reading the the order of the comments right if not i apologize um but yeah it's a great question so there's multiple sites you can get icons from i know we used to use one called like icons.dv i think but now i i use um material.io icons so these are all um designed by google it's now uh they changed the website name fonts.google.com i think you can also do you can get to it through material.io this is what i used to uh just navigate to yeah yeah so you can uh find icons um somewhere in the menus here um and it has lots of other uh design guides but i guess the uh the actual url that uh is the icons page is this fonts.google.com icons and there's probably a few different uh urls and sites within the material google website uh web that you can navigate to but all the icons i'm using today i pulled from here they have a ton they look nice and then i usually select the android or ios type when i pick one so the fingerprint icon and i select black or white depending on if my app is light themed or dark fiend themed i select the opposite so most of the time i do dark themed apps and so i select the white icon and then click download and it'll download it to your desktop and then you can upload them into app sheet from there but yeah even if if you don't like the material icons i mean just google um free uh app development icons you know and there's icon packs all over the internet and you should be able to find some that suit your needs but this is what i typically use great question um okay so back to our crm app uh let's let's do that let's create an action that will copy our request to an inspection record right so that our inspectors will now see it in the inspections app and then create an action that can just take us to that inspection record in the inspections app so that will be the the pieces that we're working on so make that a little smaller we're going to want some actions so the first one is just going to be an add a new row to another table and let's see copy request to inspection and this will be living on the request table and we want to add a new row to another table using values from this row and the table to add to is inspections and this has an initial value on it so we don't need it so at customer should be customer i believe they are named the same thing in both tables yep building i also think it's the same yep inspector this one might be called user yeah it is it's called user so it's called inspector in the inspections table the user in the request table and then the time stamp should update itself i don't know if there's an initial value on this or not so we'll just set it to in progress even though it's not technically started yet but it's not real it's demo so that'll work cool so this is an action that will appear prominently on a request record uh let's see copy yeah that looks good file import that'll be our icon and so this will create a uh a inspection record okay from the request so again let's just assume kind of a workflow here that's happening where you get a request from somewhere else and then you just want to copy that to an inspection record we can make an action to do that for us to make it faster and easier and then maybe we want to just go ahead and link to that inspection in the inspections app right and so we can create another action so i'm actually just going to copy this one so don't scroll up and utilize our link expressions to do that but this time we will use an expression called link to row okay so link to row links to a specific row so this will be a detail view um or another i guess onboarding is there any other single single row views it'll link to a view that's a single row view and a specific row and show you the details of that rail and as opposed to linking to using a link to view will just kind of goes to the the view not a specific row of the view right so that's kind of the the difference poorly poorly explained but everyone probably gets the point so let's see a link to new inspection two and then let's see yeah let's let's just go to another app sheet and for our deep link we want a link to row in this one so the syntax is a little bit different for link to row the first parameter is not a view name anymore it's the row key so the key of the row that you want to link to then the view name then the optional app id so let's insert that um and now we should we should think about this a little bit um so we need a way to get the id or the key value of the inspection that we're about to create so how do we do that well let's run this off of the inspection record it's going to be the easiest way and let's actually put a step in the middle so to to really make this clean um let's copy this and put it back on the request and make a link to uh well let's see how do i wanna do this yeah that's gonna be hard okay so we're gonna spin up a way that we can view our inspection that we that we copy so that we can again get to the inspection app um the easiest way possible so we've got our copy and then i copied this to the inspections record and this is going to be our link action so this is going is going to be what takes us to the inspections app but we're going to we're going to wait on finishing this and give ourselves a view that is not created yet or let's see if it uh we'll take if we got one created by the system already yeah so we've got we've got an inspections detail view that we can use so back on the request table i'm going to copy this one perfect and this will link to our inspection record [Music] and we'll go to another view and we'll say link [Music] inspection underscore detail that should be correct maybe this is what we should what we should do let's generate our id not in the initial value for the purposes of this workflow and do it on our copy action inspection id and then let's see if our link to row will let us reference this okay oh that we're going to keep this link to you that needs to say that and then i'm going to put these in a grouped action to kind of do them both at once so we'll copy this name call it group and execute sequential so i'll do both of these at the same time and copy request and link to inspection record and then to make things easy clear that out and save our progress oh man i have so many actions so like so i want to show the grouped action so let's just hide these do not display and do not display okay so now if we run our copy it should run both of our group actions requests i did not save my work rookie mistake but it did run for us so it created our inspection record okay so the issue here though the reason why it shows us this blank record is because the inspection detail view that we're linking to doesn't know which row to look at right so and that's the the issue and why um we need a way to reference the id of the inspection that we just created but from the request table so to do that it would take a little bit of working around that would be outside the scope of this webinar and take too long to do but um if we spin up something here that will actually let us view our inspection or we could just uh do inspections inline so we have two related inspections so this is now looking at the inspection record so i'm having to skip over getting to linking to this uh unfortunately but uh once you're looking at the inspection record uh this is uh going to illustrate the concept that i just explained a second ago and how you would fill in that step um but once we're on the inspection record we have access to this inspection id now easily easily accessible and so to round out what we're trying to do we go to our linkedin inspection and we can just give it this row right so this row is a reference to the key value of the current row that we're looking at so that action linked to new inspection is on a single row right so it knows the id value so the row that we want to look at is this row but in the inspections app and then we need to tell the name of the view in the inspections app which is probably um inspections of detail let's let's see let's go to my inspections actually we'll use the normal one yeah inspections underscore details so that's what we'll put here and then since this is linking to a specific app it's a specific you know i'm linking to an inspection record i'm going to the inspections app it makes more sense to just hard code this in the expression than try to have some dynamic value stored in a table um so we'll just copy in the name of our inspections app because that's always what we want to link to with this action that's the whole point of it so this should take us to this inspection record on the inspections detail view in the inspections app is what our action should do for us now um let's uh see clipboard make this more of an inspection e icon looks good and save it and then test it out so the last piece here as we as i kind of wrap up and pause for the last couple minutes for any questions um is rather than just going to another app like we did with the first part in our app launcher or just linking to a an overall view now we're going to specific row specific record um that's also in a specific view in a specific app but it's even more precise than that so we're on our inspection record and if we click link to new inspection it should bring us over to our field inspections app on that particular inspection record so this is that inspection that we made from copying the request see admin inspector 1150s when we made it um and i've got you know i can complete it and then i've got my checklist attached to it and so now i can fill out the inspection but we linked there from our uh crm app so hopefully that brings the integrations full circle uh from creating an app launcher to link out to different apps to just jumping back and forth between the kind of the home views and apps and then even going so far is when you're in the weeds in a specific app being able to link to a record in a different app using the id of the record that you're linking to and kind of getting those navigational integrations uh even between apps when you're drilled down a little bit so yeah i will uh pause there for the last few minutes to field any any questions um or just general comments uh and yeah thanks guys for for joining me for this one i see a couple of uh questions popping in here can we do this functionality with mysql also uh yes absolutely i'm assuming i'm assuming that the question is if you have a mysql db is your back end instead of google sheets does everything work the same way and the answer is yes uh all of the app sheet things and strategies and expressions will work exactly the same on sql um obviously you can't just you know do some of the doctoring of the data that i did and just paste things in and shift things over uh quite as easily you know without a really good um gui or something like that but yes the the basic mechanics of it on the app sheet side all work the same on sql google sheets uh smart smart table et cetera et cetera smartsheet airtable a smart table also also a great question um and any of the uh icon databases well i'll try to have those uh links posted in the description um so that they can be easily accessed by you guys at a later date um so we'll give it a couple more minutes absolutely right so glad that we could help while we're waiting for questions quick uh brief outro if you will so glad all of you guys could make it today we're so sorry that we haven't been available the last uh i don't know maybe month uh it's been crazy here um had a lot of business and had a lot of work um so it's been tough to get these things going um and make these priority um so if this is something that you guys want to continue seeing uh please show us by subscribing by liking our videos it really is how we're able to create this free content for you guys and if you have any questions or anything that you want to see in the future on a future webinar future date please send me an email clark crewtech.com um is the uh length we're using sorry for my background uh my room isn't completely clean so figured i'd uh save you guys uh save your eyes we do have a question from djb uh what is the limit um not sure what this is referring to um so if you want to elaborate feel free uh daniella hi thanks for this webinar i am new to appsheet your webinar is very useful can i see how you do the menu of your app uh actually yes so we uh already did a video on that uh maybe two months ago siege um i believe it's just called custom navigation um but i can check on that i believe it's custom navigation um so that is on our youtube channel uh and cj did do that one so it should look uh pretty pretty similar if not exactly the same as the one that he used today daniella um yeah i don't remember what it was called i think it was uh yeah something about um custom ux or user navigation um along those lines it's on our it's on our youtube channel for sure um but yeah yeah the the basic idea is that you have a um a table that just acts as your um your kind of point of navigation so instead of actually having data you know you've got a table that's uh only to be a menu it's only to function as this navigational um piece and so like this is my app menu table for um the crm app uh each of the apps has their own i could have technically combined them all into a super um app launcher for all of them and just had a column to tell me which app that they they lived in um but yeah so you have a table that's kind of set aside for it and then you've got a column for your icon um if you're going to nest screens it's going to have like a home screen and then maybe an admin menu or something like that you know you create a slice to uh divvy up the views like that but the the crux of it is the link name in this case which is the name of the view that you want to link to right um and then you create a link to view action that uh links to the the parameter that goes in the link to view action is a column value it's the link name column value and so whenever you select a row you put that link to view action on that the row select behavior so you can change the behavior when you click on a row an app sheet that maybe is the the mystery piece uh and just for reference that video is called app navigation backslash custom ux so we were both right [Laughter] yeah dj was the one that was asking about the limits he says uh what's the limit in linking apps in regarding to performance for the application what is the limit um no no hard and fast answer but so you you can do other things besides making individual apps to increase a single app's performance using security filters using archiving data techniques um to just there's several different strategies actually you can just build the architecture of your app in such a way that it only uses a small amount of data as it needs okay so that could be um each user is filtered to only see their own stuff and they don't see anybody else's stuff there are some other uh kind of more advanced architectures where you essentially drill down levels of data right and so you're only ever looking at as much as you need to look at at one point in time um without a lot of those sorts of things i mean if you start pushing 20 000 rows in google sheets uh your your app's gonna slow down a lot once you start getting that amount of rows which isn't very many um but the reality is that the server side processing the app sheet uses to go and get data from certain databases like google sheets in particular um is slow and so it also depends on which back-end you're using if you're running sql things are going to be faster for you and you can utilize active database filtering to speed things up which is not the case when you're using google sheets so there's a lot of factors that go into it there's no here's the limit my rule my advice to you would be those kind of first two principles if you have things that are separate functions right and separate processes and different people are doing them right especially that like they don't need to be on the same app they can have their own app then if it makes sense for your workflow of your use case right if the way that people are going to use the app and the functions of the app make sense to be separate then just make them separate in the first place um and you you know that would be my advice and then if down the road you do hit a point where performance is the primary concern well i mean you might have to do the work to split them split the app into multiple but you can always uh do that later on down the line um if you already have like a super app going um and yeah there's no limit but i mean you'll you'll know like once your app sync is you know 40 seconds long well maybe is that your limit maybe how patient how patient uh are you i guess i wouldn't wait that long so hopefully that gives you some context well cool uh cj we did have two more questions i believe in the chat if you want to take a look at those i believe that's it um and after these uh we will be closing the webinar down but as i said before please feel free to email me with any questions at clark crewtech.com love to be able to help you guys out as much as we can yeah let me look up the chat here uh is it possible to remove the aggregate counter of an inline reference table i.e referral don't have to assist if you don't want to uh yeah i don't think there's a way to remove that little aggregation um at the top of inline tables clark if you if you know a way you can correct me but uh i think that is just stuck there um for like table views you can specify actually what the aggregation is if it's a count of the rows if it's a sum of a certain field you can actually change what that aggregation is and that may also be an option on inline tables as well especially if you create a custom table so if you don't use the system generated one that app sheet makes if you create your own table you can get app sheet to use that your own table view excuse me you can get app sheet to use that as the inline view instead of the system generated one and then you should you might be able to change what that aggregation is but i think it's always going to do something it's always going to have a count of something i believe that i did get it to go away at one point in time uh but we ended up putting it back but yeah i was going to say the same thing your best option is to create your own uh inline view with a virtual column referencing um and then you can actually manipulate that count by um having conditions on that so excuse me um and then ganesh we're talking about the barcode uh honestly personally i don't have any as much experience with the barcodes i know we do have a barcode video out on our channel so you might want to check that out if you if if not that's not helpful for you uh email me i'll reach out to stefan and and we can see if we can't get you an answer yeah i don't think there's a way to convert text to a barcode in app sheet right the barcode scanner will convert the barcode to said text said code um and then yeah i'll it depends on a little bit of what what the i guess precise questions that you're going for but you can't um like send a doc to a printer from app sheet um unless you use like print from email and send an email to something you'd have to set up some other automations to run for you that link the whole thing together but there's no like easy app sheet functionality you can just drop in and then linking them to a folder and file again depends a little bit what you're going for but you can save files to a uh specified a custom folder path in whatever storage your app is set up to use so the defaults google drive if you if your app sheet account is a gmail domain um you can get make the custom folder path to save files um to said folder path in google drive and so you could save any info that you scan via barcode and anything else that goes along with it you know in your data entry and you could save those records into a unique folder path that you design but again it's that's not super connected to the barcode thing so i don't know if that's what you were asking or not i apologize all right um so thankful for all of your comments today it's been great uh going back and forth to you guys um and i hope that uh everything that was said today was helpful um any comments questions concerns like i said before just email me and uh we'd love to hear from you guys we'd love to hear what you guys are looking to do uh with your apps um and if there's any way that we can we can assist you in those endeavors so uh we're gonna go ahead and stop the live stream and um i'm not sure if we will have this next week um maybe the week after next but i will send out an email and let you guys know as soon as as soon as we know so thanks again guys you all have a wonderful rest of your day you

Channel: AppSheet Training

Views: 5,316

Keywords: AppSheet, Google Sheets, Custom UX, UX, PDF, Automation, Google Cloud, Email Automation, Document Generation, AppSheetTraining

Id: qbOsYZUhQhY

Length: 69min 55sec (4195 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021