🆕 Use custom value for right-hand side of template column

This would be big for @Lucas_Pires and @Robert_Petitto’s Trebuchet method, I believe.

Also, it would eliminate a lot of extra columns we had to previously create specifically for template columns.

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I see it this morning and I thought “That wasn’t there yesterday right”? Awesome! :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

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This is really Great

Oh just realized it would be much better to have the left side to be a custom value as well, it would be of great help for removing items from a joined list.

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But its custom now no? I mean if you want to remove items you can add the joined list as the thing you want to use as template and then put the item you don’t want or you want to replace in the left side of the replacement and let the right one as custom in order to simulate a “delete” item.

:thinking: what am I missing? I’m failing to see how this is any different from just entering the actual custom values in the Template field itself…

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in the image from top there is a replacement to ‘E’ that you can now put as ‘Custom’.

The left hand side is an entry that can’t be pointed to another column. Let’s say if I have a list of rowIDs I can’t know ahead what I want to replace.

Oh true, do you mean to use a column on the left side?. That’s true that is not possible (yet i hope)

Yeah I did hope that will become a thing. I was thinking I can point a rowID to that place and an empty field on the right side to “remove” that ID.

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@Robert_Petitto A template can dynamically point to another column, so at that point, you wouldn’t be able to just enter a value in the template to be replaced, but I suppose you could do the same thing in the source column or create a pre-template template. Depends on the situation.

Where I would use this, and have needed it many times, is in situations where I want to replace a character or value with a blank or null. (An example would be my calculator, where I can backspace delete the numbers. All that does is replace the last number and a special character with a null value.
Trebuchet-ish I guess you could say.) I have several sheets with a tmp-Empty or txt-Blank column just so I can do these replacements. Now I can get rid of those extra columns. Another situation might be where you want to replace a decimal or ‘0.’ with blank or null to easily create a left zero padded number value.

I think in most cases where something like this is used, the source template is dynamically driven by another column instead of typing in your own template.

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Hm…kinda following…I’m slow this morning I guess. What’s more interesting to me is when you click the triple dots:

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Basically if you need to replace a value for whatever reason with a static value, you can avoid extra columns to hold that static value. You know it when you need it…and I’ve needed it a handful of times. :wink:

That’s awesome with the special values. I don’t remember seeing that before.

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Ya. Saves me from having to create a “Timestamp Column” and then doing a Special Value hidden field in a form to populate the timestamp:

EDIT

Or so I thought…it actually appears to populate it with a NOW value…that’s misleading…or a bug?
Screen Shot 2021-04-30 at 9.26.11 AM

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Yeah, I noticed that. A little misleading with the wording. I’m guessing it’s still meant to be transferred to another column when a form is submitted???

I thought the Unique Value is interesting as well. It looks like it assigns a unique value to each row, but I wonder if something would ever cause it to change, or if it’s static, like the row id.

I guess that’s awesome!

The most common use case I can think by now is the blank/null value we can now create without creating another template column only to replace it as @Jeff_Hager said

But if you guys have more use cases, share with us :grin:

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Ya…guess it’s a way to TRIM() as well…just another example of blank/null though.

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Used this today to add a space after a comma in a delineated list:

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Bumping this. Came into a situation where I needed to set the left hand value dynamically from a column value.

This should be a relatively easy add, no?

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