Glide -> Radar

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1

Hello Glide Community!

Looking for some guidance on the Radar integration, and there doesn’t appear to be many posts about it.

When using the default “Glide Location” switch, it’s obvious to the user, but it does seem to prompt every time - which is kind of annoying. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to make it on by default; both of these are a burden on the user. When the device’s location permissions aren’t “always allow/while using the app” it just doesn’t turn on, but there is no way I can tell to check for that condition. The user is left in limbo. Lastly, if I’m using that field (location) as a condition, it doesn’t clear the field when the switch is turned off. So the condition of “is location on” can be met, but it can never be unmet. Other fields you show based on that condition never go away, even though location is turned off.

Enter Radar. Now I can just make grabbing the location easy by integrating it into an action sequence for a button. However, if the device’s location permissions are not “always allow/while using the app” it will /not/ prompt them. This leads to another problem, that action hangs - for a really long time. I’m not sure if it even fails, more testing is needed. Adding a “wait for condition” doesn’t work either because the sequence never passes Radar. It just hangs. Restarting the app fixes the issue, only until Radar hangs again.

To the questions:

  • Is there a way to “clear the field” when using Glide Location toggle and positioning it to “off?”
  • Is there a way to check for/timeout the Radar integration if it were to hang?
  • Is there a way to know the location settings before attempting either of those actions (glide location or radar) so that the user can be given instructions and/or a warning BEFORE they click a button that hangs the app with no error, notification, or recourse besides restarting the app in bewilderment?

Another possible related issue – I received a Glide error email indicating “[Track once] “ERROR_RATE_LIMIT”,” but that doesn’t seem to be an error listed in the Radar API docs – what does that mean?

This app is being used for less than 10 people, currently, so no more than 7 could have hit the button containing Track Once at the same time. Where did the rate limit get exceeded? Radar API says “1 request per second per device, 180 requests per hour per device, and 1,000 requests per day per device,” so clearly we’re good there.

Please help! :slight_smile:

2

This might be my biggest problem with it, so I abandoned it in a recent project.

My use case was just filtering pins that is within a certain radius to the user’s location, so I can use the location column in my database.

However, it prompts the user to share the location when they first open the app, and it’s not immediately clear why I would have to request that. It’s not a good first impression.

Not to my knowledge.

There might be a way using JavaScript, but I don’t know if something like returning navigator permissions is supported across all browsers.

3

Apologies, just getting back to this!

However, it prompts the user to share the location when they first open the app, and it’s not immediately clear why I would have to request that. It’s not a good first impression.

I am experiencing this now too, and it’s not great. It’s not even on a screen or an action that requests location data – it just does it on any screen because /some/ screen, somewhere, has GPS options.

Can anyone from Glide chime in on this?
Is there a Bug Report or Feature Request that I missed?

It seems like the Glide location option has been out for a while, how has this not already been addressed?

So far this has been the only real issue I’ve had with Glide - everything has been so simple the only reason things don’t work is myself making them more complex than they need to be, but this, GPS, has some pretty major issues with both available solutions.

I had temporarily disabled the GPS actions in my app, and it’s STILL asking for permission to get user location. :man_facepalming:

Another issue I have discovered… when users click the button, it writes their lat/long to a column, and then uses that data along with other previously written data to add a row in a different table. When the app hangs, sometimes it causes the data to be written twice. I don’t know if that’s the single action, or the user hitting it twice because it hung and they don’t know what’s going on, or what – but I have had multiple issues now where the action fails and multiple rows are written containing exactly the same data, including timestamps that match identically. So this isn’t a it “wrote once and then wrote again,” this is the app wrote the same data twice at the same time. (presumably when it unfroze?)

I hate to belabor the point, but what can we do about this? Surely I’m not the only one that needs to use GPS in Glide… What solutions have others used to bypass these glaring limitations?

/frustrated

4

You would have to create a Feature Requests post for it I guess, and at that point it has to be upvoted enough to be considered. We don’t know which requests are considered and in their pipeline, to be honest.

I think you have to remove anything that uses location, including components that reference location data, actions, and columns.