Sorting SQL data by user‑specific Distance column

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m running a residential cleaning business in 6 different cities, and we use Teamup as our main scheduling tool. As we grow, manually assigning jobs has become impossible, so we’re moving to a more “Uber‑like” model where cleaners can claim available jobs directly in our Glide app.

To support this, we consolidated all available jobs from all 6 cities into a single external SQL table (Supabase) that is connected to Glide. Initially this looked like the best approach compared to Glide’s native tables, but we’ve hit a limitation around sorting.

In the external SQL table, each job has a client address. In Glide, I created a computed column called location_distance that calculates the distance between the client’s address and the logged‑in user’s address/current location. The value is therefore user‑specific and changes in real time for each user.

Here’s the problem:

  1. With SQL sources, it seems that collections can only be sorted by “real” SQL columns, not by Glide computed columns like location_distance.

  2. Because location_distance is user‑specific, Supabase has no way to know which user is logged in, so I can’t calculate or sort this distance server‑side either.

So my questions are:

  • Is this behavior (no sorting by computed / user‑specific columns when using external SQL sources) expected?

  • Has anyone found a practical workaround to sort a list of jobs by per‑user distance when the base data lives in an external SQL table?

    • For example, patterns using user‑specific columns, temporary Glide tables, or any other tricks that work reliably in production.

In case there is no viable solution using a SQL table, I was thinking on synchronize the SQL table with a Google Sheet table and connect this Google Sheet table to glide, but I’m not sure if the limitations would be the same for a Google sheet table?

Any guidance, patterns, or examples would be hugely appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!

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:confused: You’ve reached one of the limitations with SQL and Glide. It’s the same for their Native Big Tables. You can’t sort a collection by any sort of computed column, save for simple math or rollup columns that directly reference a raw number.

Hoping that 2026 brings some improvements to this limitation.

The only workaround that I’ve seen in the past is using a helper table that joins the record id and distance column using JSON. A Query JSON to sort the JSON object by distance, a helper table that parses out X number of records from the helper table, and then a relation from the helper table back to the listing records. Then, you display that helper table as a list instead of the actual records with the action of view detail screen → relation instead of this item

No easy task, but possible.

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Hi @Robert_Petitto, thanks for the reply

Do you know if this limitation happens with google sheet as well?

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Nope, it shouldn’t!

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noted, quick question @Robert_Petitto

How do you recommend parsing the records from the query JSON to the helper table?

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Check out this tutorial starting at 14:25

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