I need to add a “personal journal/diary” option to the app. (multiple users, each of them cannot see others). It’s easy to do with, for example, an inline list + show form where the user can use Text Entry to add personal notes. But their personal notes are stored in the GS and visible to us. Is any way to use only their own mobile memory to store the data or other protected way to do that? This is important for privacy, of course, and we are not interested to store private info that also increases a lot the used rows.
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User specific column, I guess? You can choose the option when you add a new column in the Glide editor, the column will not be shown in google sheets either
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Thanks, Michael. I was working on this solution. Only thing that I’m not sure how data are saved on users data editor. I mean: when are they erased? Are they living inside local Glide App editor? What if we update the app? Do you have any experience on that?
Users enter 1 or 2 notes per day, like a diary, with the possibility to revise them. I don’t think is possible with user specific column.
I think they’re erased when the user erases it, it is saved in Glide database, if you are the app owner/editor and you change “Viewing as…” to any user, you can still see the note of that user (my app is private pro and that’s what i see, i am not sure if public app works the same way)
I am not sure what would happen when you update the app, you might wanna ask some cool guys in the community, but I guess as long as the users don’t change their email or remove the app or some sorts of actions like that, it’s not gonna be removed.
Do you store these in a new Sheet, added via a form?
Yes. User write via a form (form button) the new entry for the journal (it opens a simple text entry with a limit on the max length) and then data are stored in one sheet, like this:
All the users write on the same sheet.
Still looking for a safe solution where users can write their own daily notes, maintaining the privacy. As said, I don’t need to save them on Glide or on GS. The only solution that I see is to use “row owner” column and protect the email address (that anyway can be unprotected and then visible again). But either way the notes are visible on their column. Any way to save the notes only locally on the user’s device? Or anybody has a way to encrypt/decrypt the text?
There’s no way to encrypt/decrypt the text. If you’re still using forms for daily entry, then using row owners is the only way to protect that data. Users will only download their own rows.
Do you suggest other ways to do that?
I think you want to keep multiple notes attached to an event, so I don’t have an immediate thought about an alternative. I was thinking you can just point that to a user-specific column if it’s a single note.
hmm, what about writing them to a single user specific column as a joined list?
An app developer would still be able to get at them by previewing the app as a specific user, but other than that they’d be well hidden?
Sorry, not sure to understand…how to do that?
It’s a somewhat advanced technique, and I’m not even sure if it would work in this case, but it could be worth a try. Rather than try and explain it, I’ll point you to the following Tutorial…
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@PieroPec I tested here now with the method @Darren_Murphy mentioned here above + a way I use in my booking apps. But even trying hard, there’s no “easy & row safe” way to do it
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Hey! Were you able to figure a way to get this done?
I’m trying to build something similar and am facing the exact same issue!
There’s no way to store data anywhere in Glide without it living somewhere externally. The best you can do is user specific columns, but that data still lives on Glide servers.
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