@erwblo - I saw Bob Petitto mention something about golf last night…
… which reminded me of one of my most “extreme” uses of a Helper Table.
I have a Golf App that tracks scores in PGA Tour events, pulling in scores via an API every 5 minutes when an event is on. When the scores hit my App, they go into a table that looks like so:
GolferID should be obvious, Raw is a comma separated list of their scores - 72 holes for a 4 round tournament.
I use a 72 row Helper Table to dynamically transform those comma separated lists in that table to the following:
As you could imagine, the Helper Table has some pretty crazy logic, and somewhere around 200 computed columns. Here is what it looks like:
You would think that with that much going on it might be pretty slow. But it isn’t. Golfers are presented in the App as an Inline List. When you tap on a Golfer, an action sets a couple of User Specific columns in the Helper Table. This triggers the calculations for that Golfer, and their scorecard is dynamically built and instantly displayed on their details screen. Here is what that looks like:
You can do some pretty neat stuff with a Helper Table 