Hi,
These are actually two questions, on the same topic:
I’m fairly positive it’s a simple loop, but can’t wrap my head around it.
My integromat scenario is designed to open a new folder for each new client. The folder name is the client full name. As you can imagine, it can occur that two (or more) clients will have the same name. While Google Drive can support same folder name, it would be impossible for the users to distinguish between such folders without digging into each folder’s content. To avoid this, my scenario is search Google Drive for a folder with the name designated for the new folder. If it finds a folder, I’d like the scenario to add a text to this designated name, such as “- NOTE: client with same name i”. The “i” is, surprisingly, an iterator to solve the issue for when there’s more than one client with the same name.
To summarize, let’s assume we have four clients with the same name. Their folder names would be
LastName FirstName
LastName FirstName - NOTE: client with same name 1
LastName FirstName - NOTE: client with same name 2
LastName FirstName - NOTE: client with same name 3
Any ideas?
Can Glide open a file browser window on a windows PC?
All users will have Drive Desktop installed and they’ll all have access to a shard folder (not shared drive). A user will click on a link.to a folder and a file explorer window will open to the designated path. I found this workaround on Reddit but it’s not straightforward enough.
Another idea was Google’s Application Launcher for Drive from the Chrome Web Store.
WebView is also not a very intuitive solution for users that are accustomed to File Explorer.
I also store the folder ID in Glide so perhaps that helps?
Any ideas?
Regarding your number 1 question…would it make more sense to name your folder using a row id or some kind of unique identifier or number that you know will always be unique? Then you could pass either the RowID itself or a template of name and RowID or name and number to integromat. Basically make sure you have a unique value before even submitting anything to integromat.
Yeah, I thought about this option but it looks rather awkward on file explorer. As you can understand, the users are working mainly with Windows native tools/apps. Some of them don’t even know (or care) that the shared folder is actually stored on Google Drive. They want to see a clean folder tree, so codes/unique strings aren’t going to work. What’s more, even if we do use such unique strings, it won’t really help them identify which client folder they need to open. They cannot really tell the difference between “LastName FirstName sadf234rsaf” and “LastName FirstName dfgsdfg345t34s” or something similar. When I considered this solution route, I actually thought to add the client’s phone number to the folder name. Not very clean, but at least this (unique) string of numbers has some meaning to the users
Got it. Makes sense. Maybe you could do something in Glide when adding a client. Have a relation based on name and a rollup count from that relation. If the rollup is greater than zero, then that means there will be a duplicate. Take that rollup value and add 1. When the client row is written it will have that number attached to the row (this would need to use a custom form method). Then the name and number can be passed to integromat.
Just trying to think of ways to handle this on the glide side. It might be possible with integromat, but I haven’t used it so I’m not sure what it’s capable of.
Jeff is right about trying to name it right inside Glide, but I believe you can somewhat do it in Integromat as well.
When you do a search, I think you can get the number of bundles that were returned. Then you add 1 to that number when you add the new folder.
Still, I think it’s better if you find a unique value to name it. I still think it’s hard to differentiate when you have a lot of clients that look like this.
Glide - NOTE: client with same name 1
Glide - NOTE: client with same name 2
Regarding this, I don’t have experience showing a Drive folder inside Glide. I believe, if this is possible, it can only be done with a webview component so if webview can’t show the “file explorer” window you expect, then there’s nothing else.
