Your sheet needs a Row ID column first (yet Row ID exists)

I’m suddenly seeing this error when trying to add new rows to some of my tables in the Glide Data Editor:

Your sheet needs a Row ID column first.

Without a Row ID Glide can’t accurately add new data to this sheet.

I use Google Sheets as my primary data source. The error started occurring after I renamed one of my sheets in Google Sheets (but reverting the renaming doesn’t resolve it). The layouts work all fine. It’s strange because I already have row ID columns in both the Google Sheet and the Glide tables.

I’d appreciate any ideas what’s causing this behavior and how to fix it.

You lost row ID by changing the name of the column or sorting… you need to add a new one

As Uzo said, there might be a point where you unknowingly changed the name of the rowID column and it got “disconnected”, so Glide now see it as a text column instead of a “rowID” column.

If it isn’t too much of a hassle (relating to the rowIDs being used in other tables), you can try removing the current column, and add a new rowID column to see if it helps.

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I didn’t really change the name of the column. As mentioned, I changed the sheet name of the underlying Google Sheets table.

In any case, I had to recreate the row ID with these steps:

  1. [In the Google Sheet] Rename existing Row ID column to “Old Row ID”
  2. [Glide Data Editor] Attempt to add a new row to raise the “Your sheet needs a Row ID column…” alert. Click “Add Row ID”
  3. [Google Sheet] Replace the contents of the (new) Row ID column with the values from “Old Row ID” to preserve any existing relations/lookups
  4. [Google Sheet] Delete the “Old Row ID” old ID column
  5. [GDE] Sync data manually for the changes to take effect

I suspect this will break things. When Glide syncs back the IDs from the Sheet, this will be read as “text” and not truthfully rowIDs, since they are not a match with what Glide has under the hood.

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