Building a comedogenic product ingredient checker

Ask for Help
1

hi! i am trying to build an app that will:

  1. allow the user to paste an ingredient list they are researching into a text entry box
  2. optimally, press a button to ‘activate’ the search
  3. the system will clean the user input list (change all ingredients to lower case, remove any asterisks or extra spaces, etc), split each ingredient, match each ‘cleaned’ up ingredient against my google sheet database and
  4. end with the search results visible to the user to see what ingredients their product has that’s in our database and what comedogenic rating we’ve given it.

i’ve tried multiple times to build this and the AI assistant is not very helpful. i am not a programmer by any means and would even pay someone to help me build this. not sure how much i can get done by messaging here, hoping i can get on a call with someone to see what i’m doing wrong (or rebuild from scratch).

thanks for any help anyone can share! quite desperate here.

2

Requiring a button to activate he search adds a little more complexity and extra steps, but I’ll give you instructions anyway. You can choose if you need the button or not.

  • I will assume you already have a text entry on the screen and it is attached to a column in your table. Let’s call that column ‘Input’. Make sure it is a user specific column because you want each user to have a unique experience without bumping into each other.
  • To integrate it to work with a button you will need to add a second user specific column (let’s call it ‘Search’), you will need to add a button and give it a Set Column action that will copy the Input column value to the Search column value. (Anything below will now be based on the Search column value, but you could skip the button altogether and use the Input column, which would provide search results in real time as the user types instead of having to press a button)
  • Add a lowercase text column that takes the Search column and converts all text to lowercase.
  • Add a template column which takes the lowercase text column as input and set up replacements for any character you want removed. (normally I would set up a javascript column to handle lowercase and stripping of characters, but we will stick with the built in features)
  • You didn’t specify what each the delimiter would be between each ingredient (ex comma or space). Probably easier to convert commas to spaces with the template column since user input is unpredictable. What you will then do is create a Split Text column that splits the ingredients into an array. The split by character would be a space.
  • Once you have the array, create a relation column that links the array to your ingredient table.
  • Now you can add a collection source from the relation.
2 Likes