Remote lookup from external data source?

Feature Requests
1

Is it possible to have the user make an entry into a Glide App. Use the entry to do a remote look up and share the results with the user. e.g.

Zip Code: (user enters zip code)
{I run a small script - perhaps in a Google Sheet cell - to retrieve information related to that zip code. This would be from an external web site. e.g. what is the phone number for the local firestation for that Zip Code}

And then I show the results to the user for the Firestation within the Glide App.

Thanks.

1 Like
2

Yes. There could be up to a 3 min delay however.

3

Please tell me more on how this might be done. Thanks.

Deepak

4

I admit that I didn’t read your post closely enough and thought you were wanting geocoding data. In any event there are a few options that I would try. Using IMPORTHTML() function and passing in a few search urls as well as IMPORTXML(). Also if you can find a site that returns JSON with the info you are looking for you could try this library. https://github.com/bradjasper/ImportJSON/blob/master/ImportJSON.gs I have used this successfully to get geocode data from here: https://www.geocod.io/docs/?shell#batch-geocoding
You need to sign up for a free account and unless you get a lot of data points its free. Good luck!

2 Likes
5

George, is it possible to set the data trigger on JSON script? I need to get the live data to my google sheets from it but I am not sure if that is only one off fetch or you can actually set it somehow to refresh let’s say every minute.

6

Do you know if IMPORTXML will allow to refresh in the background?

7

@tomstoj . Read through this thread. IMPORTXML would work the same as importrange, so yes you can get it to refresh with a script and a timed trigger. Same with a JSON import script function you could write. You could have it refresh the data every min.

2 Likes
8

FYI I went down the IMPORTXML path using Google’s Geocode API thinking I wouldn’t run into any traffic issues… hit 60,000 requests. Looking around it seems the nature of IMPORTXML refreshes quite often so if you get multiple sheets with requests going it can get to be pretty heavy lifting… and untenable if you’re building a service.

If I could figure out how to do one IMPORTXML effort then freeze the lon, lat responses that’d work… but I’m struggling. :thinking:

9

Thanks for this tip, George. Gave me an idea, and now I can display weather in my app!