I created a star ratings & review workflow (EDIT: and used the same concept to create a detailed application form) that does not increase the number of rows in the app and records all submitted data to a single cell. At the moment it works like a charm for adding new reviews. It’s an alternative if you need to strictly limit your row usage and don’t mind a bit more rigidity in the review structure. Although, it is quite flexible in terms of formatting and scaling.
Note: I did not involve a user column since my app is set to “no sign-in”.
This is my first time tinkering solo so let me know what you think and if there’s an easier way to do it.
Instead of creating a Review Log table, I added a user specific column for the reviews and a user specific column for the ratings to my primary table with all my businesses (to gather new the data there).
Additional columns to feed Star Ratings:
All Stars – Text Column to output current incremented star ratings
Stars Combining – Template column to concatenate current star ratings with newest submission
USC Rated? – Boolean column (triggered by submit action)
Finally a custom action is used to get current date & time, then set column values All Stars and All Reviews, increment Star submission # and set “USC Rated?” boolean column to true (to use for component visibility).
**Important note: For the custom action, I needed to set the timestamp column value first or else it might not be placed in the review.
Then I set the All Stars and All Reviews column values as shown below:
**EDIT
I have also used this method to build a single row Add Business form - no sign-in option. Full record of applications exist in a single formatted cell. Easy for anyone to create!
Kind of but it isn’t used as a delimiter for the star values… I’m using “+” to create a Summation string then dividing by the # of submissions increment in my Av Star Rating math column.
There isn’t a conventional delimiter in this method. The “Combining Reviews” template column outputs to “All Reviews” in HMTL format and the reviews are read using Rich Text in a slide in overlay.
The current columns look like this. The Combining column already sees that 3 is being written. When I click submit, the user specific rating of 3 will be added to “All Stars” and the Av Star Rating will update.
I looked at the Trebuchet videos. Very sophisticated! @Robert_Petitto is a real gem for sharing that with us.
Correct me if I’m wrong though… I don’t think it fits my use case since I’m not working with signed-in users so that pretty much throws user editing out the window. Another hiccup is that I assume the Trebuchet method also triggers updates and since my app is a free, public community-type app (ultimately targeting 1.4 million people), I definitely wouldn’t want to risk using any integrations that would incur additional cost - I’m limited to 500 updates/month.
If the JSON integration is (update-)free, definitely let me know because it can certainly help me with the task of removing any spam reviews on the back end - currently I’d do this by manually editing the All Reviews text column.
The workflow I showed here is a basic, layman-style workaround, that involves: 10 columns and a static reference table to set up and display the average star ratings; 4 columns to add review comments; 1 custom action to bring it all together. Do you think there’s a way to condense these further in order to simplify the process (without cost, of course )?
ok great. I’ll see if I can make the workflow more sleek with JSON.
Is there a list of free integrations that I can refer to? I pretty much never click on integrations because I’m afraid of using updates.
**oh, another question. My app has slowed down in the past month. Would using JSON slow it down more?
In your case with the Maker plan, if you used Google sheets, then the data changes in the sheet would incur updates. Other than that, any integration that uses updates will explicitly tell you how many updates it uses when you try to add it.
Is there something I can do to reduce the time? I got tips from @Himaladin so I’m slowly replacing my png/jpeg images with webp files.
He also mentioned that too many containers on a single tab can slow the speed but i tried deleting a few and the loading time remained unchanged.
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