I think there are a couple of ways to approach this so I wanted to check in with the experts here first.
I have a social app where a user can add a group. The Groups sheet contains important info about the group and a separate Members sheet contains a list of people, the groups they belong to, if they are an admin of said group, etc. (Groups can have multiple admins).
When a new group is created, I want to also create a new row in the MEMBERS database for the creator / admin.
What do you think would be the best way to pull this off? The group will get âorphanedâ if it does not have a member, so the row in Members needs to be created immediately.
I like the suggestion from a UX perspective because after creating a group it makese sense to have a flow where you would share your group and invite members.
I am not sure I completely understand the implementation of your idea. But I should first point out that the groups are location based and are currently added from a map based browse UI:
So, with the current design I donât think that I would be able to show the group creator a second form after creating a new group since I am using the add functionality from the map component:
I have a similar issue. My app has a list of contacts and a list of companies on two separate sheets. The use-case is when a user adds a new contact. The new contact form has select âcompanyâ choice or a new âcompanyâ text field. If the user enters a new company and clicks submit, it will save the new contact, but I would also like it to append the new company to the âcompanyâ list.
I think you could add another column and call it âGroup creator/adminâ and capture the email address of the person who creates this form in that column. Then you could have a relation from this sheet to your user profiles sheet to link admin.
You user profiles sheet always has the emails of everybody who has come in on the app anyways, you could create a multiple relation in that sheet and relate it with the new group admin column.
@Manan_Mehta Unique can be a little scary if you also have related columns in the same sheet as the unique formula. If a contact would be deleted or the sort order changed, this could potentially bring in the unique values in a different order and break the link between the unique column and any other company information in the company sheet. I think this would be better off with a script or Zapier or Integromat integration to only add company names that are not already in the sheet. @Jeremy_P is there any other additional pieces of information in your company sheet, or is it just a list of companies? You should be able to also build your company choice component off of the contact sheet (I think it only shows unique values), but if you need it to to be written to the company sheet to build out additional company information (address, phone, etc.), Then I would recommend the the script/zapier/integromat option.
I suppose I could introduce the concept of an additional role. The creator could have the role of âgroup ownerâ and the owner or other admins could make someone else a âgroup adminâ. I would have to add an extra bit of login whenever I need to make certain functions permission based but thatâs not a big deal.
Oooh never heard of that service. Looks like it could be handy for things like sending a new user a welcome email, sending a new group owner a message with some tips, etc.
I donât have any personal experience, but from what Iâve read, quite a few people use it and seem to like it better than Zapier. Iâve read itâs easier to use too.
Yes I agree on that. Usually when I use this, I never allow deleting in my app and that could be a limitation.
As another robust solution, I use Apps Scripts to append rows based on conditions. That works like a charm but can get pretty complicated to understand.
Hmmm. Looks like you get throttled to a 15 minute interval time for Integromat and Zapier until you get up to their mid-range plans.
@Manan_Mehta I could not find pricing for Apps Scripts - is it free? How fast is the update interval? Are you open to sharing any of your code? I understand if not.
function Rcomments() {
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getSheetByName("Request Comments");
var values = ss.getRange("A2:AQ").getValues();
//notification 1 on Pluhg Creation
for (var i in values) {
if (values[i][2]) {
var row = i
var time = new Date();
var ID = values[i][1];
var Receiver = values[i][6];
var message = values[i][9];//Message
if (values[i][6] != '' && values[i][8] == '' ) {
Utilities.sleep(1000);
var row = +i + 2
ss.getRange(row, 9).setValue("Sent");
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var sheet = ss.getSheetByName('Notifications')
sheet.appendRow([time,ID,Receiver,"Comment",message]);
SpreadsheetApp.flush();
}
}
}
}
This is a script I am using to create new notifications into a new sheet when thereâs a new row in another sheet. It may be complicated to understand and I might have to do a complete post to walk through this.
Apps Scripts are free. Google has daily quotas on the number of triggers and scripts you can run. I have triggered to run this script every minute. Thatâs the smallest time interval Google offers.
You can modify this script in your case exactly the way you need it.
Oh sweet, thanks for sharing that. Given the complexity of that code snippet (for me at least), I will likely hold off on trying to test this for a little bit. I donât want to implement code that I donât fully understand and I just donât have the time to spend on this right now.
After a private beta, I learned that the Integromat is not going to work for me. A couple of these âscenariosâ running every minute creates so many operations that I would need to upgrade from the $29 / mo plan to $99 / mo.
I throttled the scripts back to run every 15 minutes and my users ended up joining their newly created groups as members because they were not added as admins fast enough.
Before giving up on this method, I guess I should consider migrating to apps scripts and roll it out to more users.
