Important warning Glide Bug - plus maybe someone can help - Duplicate entries

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Hi,

We have run into a show stopper problem with Glide. It has harmed our business, our reputation, and client trust, and caused a lot of work for us. I will explain it here a) as a warning to everyone in case you have not come across it yet, and b) in the hope that someone has come across it and has an idea of what to do.

The problem:

When users are submitting forms - Glide is sporadically creating duplicate rows in our sheet, sometimes as many as four additional rows, with identical timestamp (to the millisecond), and identical unique idā€™s, and all other fields the same. Based on how we use the data downstream it has cause a large problem for us, glide is one part of a larger ecosystem we have built.

Glide response so far

Glide engineering say they are ā€˜confidentā€™ it is googles fault, i think they believe something like: google thinks it did not write, and sends a false positive failure to Glide, glide tries to write it again, but it is actually already there. Hence the multiple rows. Glide said they will file a bug report, but said they donā€™t know if they will get a response, or if it will be addressed. They have suggested our options are:

  1. Wait and hope google comes back with a fix.
  2. If option (1) is not suitable for us > leave the platform (presumably to find an alternative solution that works)

Where we stand now

Glide have suggested some hacks to work around the duplicate content, but they are complicated and painful for us, vs having the product (Glide) work as described. We have something in place for now, but it is not a long term solution, unless this is resolved fast we have to go with (2) which is a huge pain for us, as we have already invested effort in utilizing Glide - assuming it is a robust solution. So itā€™s double work, and at a time when we cannot easily afford to build out for something different.

Background on our use case

Some other key points, in case it helps anyone trying to help us troubleshoot it

  • we have several apps, all feeding the same file
  • the data is over 10k rows.
  • the problem only started around early Nov as far as I can tell
  • we have been receiving this error message, but were told ā€˜donā€™t worry about itā€™ by glide. It did predate this problem, so it may not be connected, but mentioning it just in case.

Glide cannot load data from your spreadsheet. Itā€™s not clear what the cause of this issue is. If it persists, please get in touch with us

Thank You

Thanks to the community in advance, and best of luck, and I suggest keep an eye on this closely in your own apps, especially if duplicate rows would also cause you a problem

Regards.

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Just a thought (and maybe this is the workaround you already have?), could you not have a trigger function that detects duplicate rows and removes them as soon as they appear?

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Yeah, this would be the most straightforward way to get around this.

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Add-on for removing duplicate entries in Google sheet

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Thanks very much all - given how critical the sheet is, and given the glide solution is already unstable, I donā€™t think Iā€™m comfortable installing a 3rd party add on to perform functions on it. Also Iā€™m really not certain that this is the only thing wrong - or - that this particular error behaves consistently. Hoping for an insight to pinpoint the foundation of the problem rather than a band aid on top.

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Sheet has that built-in feature so you donā€™t have to install a 3rd party one, however there must be someone doing this once in a while.

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Thanks Thinh. Yes doing it almost in real time if we are to prevent client issues.

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Iā€™ve gotten 20+ duplicate rows IN THE GLIDE EDITOR from a single ā€œAdd rowā€ action from a HUGE client. Itā€™s still under the radar but I hope this gets solved very soon. @david itā€™s the probate app :frowning:

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Has anyone found a solution to this problem? This just started happening yesterday in one of our Pro apps and is a dealbreaker for the client (for obvious reasons).

Iā€™m seeing multiple threads on this, going back months.

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Do you have any forms that have an ā€œon submitā€ action that is add row?

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I have the same problem, its a very easy app and almost empty, but ā€¦