I’m working on a new app that will remove previously selected items from a choice component.
The app opens with the user selecting two choice components. Once they’re selected, a form button is displayed.
Once the form is submitted, I use relations and filtering to exclude the previously submitted choices from the components on the first screen.
It “looks” like this is working, but the app holds onto the previously submitted value — even though the choice component now appears to be empty, it still tries to display the choice that was submitted, but it’s shown as blank. Because of this, I can’t hide my form button reliably because the app is not viewing that choice component as empty (just blank, it seems).
@Robert_Petitto have you experienced this in any of your bookings apps? Do you have any ideas for workarounds?
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Is this because you’re writing those choice component values to User Specific Columns? Yeah…that’s been the bane in a few of my apps. I’d REALLY like a compound action that clears a column once a form is submitted.
@Antonio already knows this is a priority for us 
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They’re not actual user-specific columns, but they are — they’re on a details view that is filtered by signed-in user and writing to rows for each user (I need the values in the sheet so I’m not using Glide user-specific columns for this).
That would be awesome if the compound actions had this as an option. I don’t know how it would work though, as it would have to act on the form submit button, not the form button itself (or else you’d lose the column values that get transferred to the form submission).
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It seems this is should now possible with the Clear Column action — but it’s not working as I’d hope.
When you use the Clear Column action, it clears the value right away and doesn’t pass the values to the form as Column values. It would be GREAT if the entered values could stick and be passed as Column values THEN cleared.
In my mind, if the Open Form action is before the Clear Column Action, those columns should still pass to the Form, but they’re not.
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I have exactly this problem. I have a choice list say (-,1,2,3 for example) and if someone select a choice “1” in a form without saving and then changes his/ her mind and chooses back “-” and saves the form, there is actually something recorded in google sheet even though we can’t see it. If we test ISBLANK() in Google sheet - it shows up FALSE. Manually pressing delete on that cell will completely remove whatever that is there that we can’t see.
How to solve this problem?
What if you make the choice required so the ‘-’ goes away, then instead have a value like ‘0’. Then they have to select something to submit, but it will always be a value you recognize.
Thank you for the suggestion. I have considered this but it the scenario does not allow required fields as there are other fields that they can choose. I will submit a ticket.
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The only other immediate option would be to change your logic to instead check if the value is NOT one of the available options.
Or…I’m guessing it can either be a null value or blank in the cell, so maybe you could find a way to check for both options and return False if either is met.
Thank you again!
Support has responded that they could replicated this issue but …
Unfortunately this behavior is a limitation with the Google Sheets API and if we attempt to change the way we write to individual cells it will severely affect performance for all other things. The word from development is that a fix for this won’t happen anytime soon.
Here is a simplified work-around to use instead of EMPTY():
LEN(cell)=0
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