Upload File Field Is Disappearing When Data is Populated

[Meghan_O_neal]

I’ve created a simple app for a business associate of mine so he can upload his business receipts and track his expenses. It’s basically a form that allows him to photograph his receipts and input various information about them into glideapps (linked to Airtable), and then it has several screens where that data is summarized and presented in different views.

The app was working great, but then after I completed, in airtable I created 30 lines of test data, complete with file uploads for each line. When I did this, suddenly in GlideApps, my form screen was no longer showing my “Upload Receipt” field. That field had just disappeared, and not just from the screen — when I went to the dropdown that assigns fields in Glide, it was no longer listed as an option there either. So, I went into the data view inside Glideapps. The field and the file uploads were still in the data view inside glide apps, but now the icon had changed from the attachment icon, to three horizontal lines.

So, thinking I’d made some weird mistake, I decided to recreate the field. I created a new attachment field for his receipts, set it up in glide apps where the old one had been . . . and it worked fine, at first . . . . . But, then I added “receipt files” to the 30 lines of test data in the app for this new field, and immediately, the same thing happened again: The field disappeared from my form and from the dropdown menu, and even though I could still see it in the data view in Glide, it’s icon changed to the 3 horizontal lines.

I’ll show this process in the attached video I made for glide support. Video of File Issue Sent To Glide Support

What am I doing wrong? lol

Here’s a screenshot showing what my initial receipt field changed to — it had previously had the same icon that is shown in “Receipt 5” field. It’s also no longer found on my drop down menu’s in Glideapps.

[Jeff_Hager]

When you add more than one attachment in the same cell, it become an array. Arrays can’t be used in components that only accept single non array values. Remember, certain column types in Airtable are specific features of Airtable and not always compatible with Glide.

You need to either have only one attachment per column per row, or use a Multiple Images column in Glide, which will only live in Glide and not sync to Airtable. Also the Multiple Image column type doesn’t pay well with external databases so it becomes user specific, which only makes it visible to the user that uploaded it.

[Meghan_O_neal]

Thanks Jeff, so if I understand you correctly, the reason the field changed is because I must have uploaded more than one attachment in one of the lines of my test data to the “Receipts” field?

Let me check that. Thank you, I’d not even thought about that. I’ll let you know the outcome.

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[Jeff_Hager]

Yes, in your video I can see 2 images in one of the rows.