I can’t stress enough the importance of this.
@Robert_Petitto in the other thread where we talked about speed an efficiency, I was trying to come up with a better way to show a screen with a calendar layout, where the user has over 3000 rows of data and each of those rows has a fair amount of computed columns on it. I realize loading 3000 rows is going to be slow, so I’m trying to find a good way to only show the latest day’s (not only today’s lessons, but instead the latest date, which could potentially be yesterday or any prior day’s lessons) lessons on the screen so it only has to load 10 or so rows. So instead of pointing the tab to the Lessons sheet, I’m pointing the tab to the Coaches sheet, which only has 5 rows. From there I created a relation to the Lessons sheet so I could get the latest date for that coach via a Rollup column. With the coach email and the latest date as a template, I then created another relation to link back to the Lessons sheet to get only the latest lessons, but I think this still has speed issues because I think the initial relation causes the Lessons sheet to run through all of it’s calculations before returning anything back to the relation in the coaches sheet, and it ultimately gave me some weird results for a few seconds while everything was loading and processing the computed columns first.
So using your idea above, I tried to think backwards and figure out the latest lessons for each coach within the lessons sheet and create a template on those lessons with the coach email and ‘true’ if it’s the latest date. After that, I tried to delete the old setup in the coaches sheet, but the old relation, which was now broken from me deleting other columns, was causing my browser to crash every time I scrolled the old relation column into view. Spent about an hour and a half just trying to delete a column, but finally after some persistance, I got it to go away. Now I’m trying to create a new relation using ‘Coach - true’ from the coaches sheet to the lessons sheet and try to match up to the template in the Lessons sheet (‘Coach - true’) where it only shows if it’s the latest date for that coach.
The problem I have now, is that whenever I try to create that new relation, using the templates, the glide interface locks up and the browser crashes. Probably because I’m trying to do self relations in the Lessons sheet, on 3000 rows to the same 3000 rows, so it can determine if any particular lesson for that coach is also on the latest date of the last lesson that coach entered. Somehow it just becomes too much for the browser to process and simply crashes without being able to add the relation.
If only we could establish these relations or rollups with conditions instead, then I feel like it would make things more efficient. I keep going back to my familiarity with SQL and how incredibly powerful it can be in processing large amounts of data on the fly. With glide, it seems like it processes data differently and not very efficiently. I think if we could set conditions on some of these columns, then glide could directly access only the data it needs instead of having to load absolutely everything at once, process through it, then go through the next computed column to determine what needs to happen with that returned data. I think creating relations upon relations to get the same results in roundabout ways with multiple columns is what’s causing speed issues as well as limiting us from being able to properly process some of this data in the data editor. (My other big issue is trying to rollup a number conditionally where the date in a relation is less than the date of the current record. Not a simple true/false comparison, but instead an unlimited range of dates prior to the current row’s date. You can’t do this in UI. It has to happen within the rollup.)
Just venting, because some of these limitations are really starting to slow down my app and I’m only working with 5600 total rows for the whole app. I already have multiple google spreadsheets (entire spreadsheets…not sheet tabs) in play, just to handle some heavy processing that a conditional relation or conditional rollup would fix easily, and I’m trying to get away from having to do any formulas in the google sheet so I can avoid any lag. I feel like I’m so close, because I think I know what’s causing the slowness and what needs to happen to speed it up, but I just can’t find a better workaround. I think @Krivo’s case is just another example of a need for this.