Hi,
Can someone help me understand if Glide Big Tables is good for setting up Chat functionality in a Glide app. I set up my first iteration of it and it looks like the messages don’t actually appear unless I manually reload the table.
So, how exactly does it work and is chat maybe not a good use case for Glide Big Tables? If it is, how do I set it up to automatically sync the tables?
Have you tried a “Reload Query” action when you submit the messages?
Yeah, I was going to suggest similar. The problem is that will only help the user that sent the message.
The intended recipients of the message won’t see it until they also reload. So you either need to add a “Reload” button or similar to allow users to manually refresh, or get a bit creative with the flow and build a Reload Query step into an action somewhere.
Personally, I don’t think Big Tables are a good choice for Chat type functionality. At least not just yet.
Thanks Darren. On that note, if I am already close to the 25k row limit with my Airtable source, then I will still run into row limit issues even if I use glide tables correct?
In short, is it 25k per source or total?
It’s 25k rows per App for “Spreadsheet” data sources, which would include Airtable.
If I was going to implement a Chat feature, I think I would seriously consider using regular Glide tables, with each distinct conversation stored in a single row as a JSON object. There would be a limit to the number of messages per conversation, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to either archive older messages (perhaps into a Big Table) or set it up with a fixed limit with older message automatically being removed as new ones are added. eg. FIFO style.
Awesome! Definitely will use Glide Tables for this. Have no problem moving it over to Big Tables later.