I’ve built a sales lead tracker app with Glide and about 25 people are using the app.
Of late all my users have been complaining that the data they input into the app are not getting updated. I thought that this could be due to patchy internet and asked them to use the app only on a steady internet connection. But they’re still facing problems.
The most recent issue was this:
User updated several records with new data
User saw the changes take effect in the app (the sales leads moved from follow-up list to upcoming list)
After some time, all these changes got reverted automatically. i.e. the leads that were moved to the upcoming list came back to the follow-up list.
My app currently has more than 5000 rows, if that is relevant. I had recently cleaned up some old records (when total row count exceeded 10,000 rows).
This is not the typical lag of 3-10 minutes. The update does not happen at all in some cases. It’s also not that it never updates - the behavior is erratic, sometimes it gets updated and sometimes it doesn’t.
I am unable to figure out what the problem is or what to even tell them.
I would really appreciate some help with this, else if this goes on they will go back to the spreadsheets. Glide has really helped streamline the sales lead follow-ups, so I don’t want to lose that and go back to the messiness of spreadsheets. But this problem of records not getting updated is significant because if the data is not up-to-date they lose their whole day’s work.
I have been testing the app today and I see that there is a significant delay in updating. Definitely for more than an hour. If I log into Glide builder and reload the sheet, then the data gets updated.
But the expected spreadsheet-to-Glide communication is slow enough to cause significant problems with the team’s efficiency.
My app was grandfathered into the PRO tier when the payment plan was introduced. I can make a case to the management for us to become a paying customer, if that helps prioritize this help request. However, I do need a solution to this recurring problem that the team is facing.
I push very hard for Glide adoption in my company, even to build other apps for other teams, but when there are these problems that I cannot solve I am left being the only person who wants to use the app and others think it’s unreliable and bring down their stats.
I am talking about the regular data updates - as in when users enter something, it should reflect in the app. Or when a formula calculates something, it should reflect. These are the updates are are getting delayed, and hence my concern.
This seems like a similar problem to mine, except that I don’t have any empty columns.
However I do have some sheets that are work-in-progress, I will be adding them later as new tabs to the app. Could that have anything to do with the update delay issue?
Do you by chance use a lot formulas or scripting in your app? I had a similar issue in my app when several rows of data were added though the app in rapid succession. This was causing scripts, formulas and queries to run over and over, which resorted a table, which caused more formulas and queries to reprocess. This resulted in some data loss because the google sheet was too busy processing to accept data from Glide. I ended up spending some time making my process much more efficient and that seemed to help a lot. If the sheet is open in your browser, then I think your computer takes over formula processing. If you don’t have the sheet open, then I think Google servers handle processing, which is much faster.
I face the same issue today, due to the same origin (Formula + Scripting + Gsheet opened in broswer).
Is there a way to force ‘Google’ to reprocess or restart processing data sent by Glide?
I have a lot of arrayformulas, but no scripts except for the daily backup which I run once at night.
It does not make much difference if I have the spreadsheet open on my computer, but I will check once again. When I have the Glide builder open, I see the Reload prompt icon on the side menu on every update on the sheet, which is practically every minute or so during the day.
The funny thing is, users input data using the app itself and even when it shows on the actual spreadsheet it does not reflect back on the app.
I suspect it may have something to do with the PRO tier and the app having been grandfathered.
On my side, data has finally been pushed to the Gsheet ‘automatically’ after few hours. No data seems to be lost. So I’m fine for now, but I’ll try to review the Gsheet side (reduce formula, size and scripts).
I have user pushing input through the app and the rows are shown on the “Data” tab. However, the spreadsheet is not updating to reflect those new rows. I have no arrayformula or any formulas in my sheet. I have simple math columns just adding a few columns together and averaging numbers.
