I am designing a stock market lookup (glide)app which uses google sheets as data source. I have an external API that picks the latest price from stock market and updates specific fields in google sheet. The frequency of updating google sheet is configurable and can range between every 15mins to hourly. How will glide calculate the updates for this scenario? i.e Will glide include external API update to data source for billing?
If you can call that API directly from glide, you could eliminate google sheets altogether and as a result, eliminate sync counts.
Technically you could set it up in such a way that it hardly uses any update counts at all. A mix of a math column to calculate a value that only updates every 15 minutes, which could be enough to trigger a JavaScript column or Fetch JSON column that retrieves data from the API.
Two things to be aware of though, is that moving the API call from the google sheet to glide could potentially expose any private API keys to tech savvy users. Also, the API call would be called from each user device instead of a central google sheet, so you blow through any rate limits imposed by the API much sooner if you have a lot of users.
Back to your question: Glide usually counts an update when it syncs. A scenario like this may require you to turn on Extra Syncs, which will incur an update every few minutes regardless is data changed or not. This if course bis only while the app is in use by someone. However, if you leave Extra Syncs turned off, then glide only counts an update if data changes, but google may not send the data to glide, and glide won’t be actively checking for updates unless you change data via the app. This is one reason to consider moving the API call to glide, but you do have to consider any exposed API keys and the number of devices that may be calling that API at any one time.
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Thanks Jeff. In my case the end user would use glide app as a facade to view certain fields from a portfolio ( data source managed by a portfolio manager) and there is no use case (yet) where a user is expected to perform an update via glide. I’ll create a clone to try out the math column option you suggested. Thanks for your valuable inputs.
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