Hi! I have an app environment for corona self-testing via video calls with agents, and there are three apps:
- User
- Agent
- Admin
I started basing everything off Google Sheets (GS) with computed columns. Works decently well.
But things do get slow, and between apps I found there was a 20 - 45 second round trip time for data…
Example: the user clicks on a button ‘ready to start a video call’ - and the agent should then have this item appear in an inline list. I timed it … Workable enough for a prototype, but ugly in terms of user experience
(note - a call with an agent to do a corona test should take 4 - 8 mins… if I lose 2-4 mins on response time, then the company has much less capacity to do tests).
So next stage: use a Glide Table to handle the interactions.
– much faster response time (3-5 sec), for the user doing user things, and doing things with the agent
- because we are not forcing the Glide app to write too and from GS
OK, so now I have a Glide Table, ‘TestFlow’ that is shared
Observations:
- Row IDs are different between the tables (logic! but a surprise at first)
- computed columns do not appear in both apps – I need to duplicate them where needed (also logic!)
- usc values are not accessible across sheets (obviously!)
- deleting rows from Glide Tables is ugly (if you do it manually, you get weirdness… programmatically should work though… but it is worth thinking around your problem to see how creative you can get)
So some things I am doing:
- using actions and set columns to ‘move’ data into columns I need (i.e. from a usc column to another column)
- using one of the first actions after the row has been created to copy the Row ID from the user side into a common ‘TestFlow ID’ that is accessible to the agent as well
The great news is that it is really fast, and allows you to do all kinds of cool, near unimaginable things 