How components link to sheets?

Hello everyone. I’ve been training my hand in glideapps for quite some time and now I’m about to release a rather complex application. Despite this, it is still completely incomprehensible to me how the connection of components with sheets works. Why do some components have the ability to interact with other sheets, some do not.


Why not give the opportunity to choose anything at all, it will greatly simplify the use. Because now you have to write scripts and formulas for Google spreadsheets in order to get around the lack of interconnection between the component and the sheets. This is perhaps the biggest disadvantage that glideapps has for me.

Please, who can easily convey not so much the principle of operation as the instruction:
Navigate to that table, add a specific format column, and now the component sees it as a sheet.

Thank you)

Components are linked to the sheet that the details screen is linked to. A tab has to point to a specific sheet. If your tab is set up with a details style layout, then your detail screen is connected to the first row, or the first row that matches a filter for that screen. Components connect to that row of data. If you tab is set up as a list style view, then you are viewing a list of row data from the sheet that the tab is connected to. When you click on a list item to view it’s details, then you are viewing a specific row in that same sheet, and thus the components are still connected to that specific row in that sheet.

You can’t just pull values from other sheets into a detail screen, because how would glide know which row of data in those other sheets you need?

Now, there are still ways to pull data from other sheets into the sheet row you are viewing. One way is to use Single Value columns which can pull specific column values from other sheets, or from relations. Normally you can select a specific column of data from the first row or the last row in the other sheet, but you can also specify a specific row number. Another way is to create a Relation column that links the current row you are viewing to a matching row in another sheet. Once that relation is established, then you can retrieve specific columns from that relation using a Lookup column.

As for the user profile table, yes you can refer to the user profile columns all over in the app. User profiles are special though, because the option to select from the user profile always pulls from the row that belongs to the signed in user, so glide always knows which row of data you are referring to when you select the option to use the user profile.

Glide can’t “guess” which row of data you want to use from other sheets, so you have to tell it using the above methods. That’s why you can’t just pull values from other sheets. Your screen is referring specifically to one sheet at a time.

It would help if you explain one specific use case where you are having problems, but if you are reverting to google sheet scripts to get around some of this, then I would spend some time learning about Single Values, Relations, and Lookups to learn how to connect sheets to other sheets. It sounds like you aren’t using the built in glide functions that make this much easier to handle.

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