Iโm migrating an essential app from Google App Maker to AppSheet, and I canโt figure out how to give users a Google Drive File Picker to connect a document that lives in our domain to a record.
I know I can have people download files from Drive and then upload them in AppSheet, but from a UX standpoint, that makes no sense โ not only does it introduce workaround steps that shouldnโt be necessary, but it creates a new version of the file in Drive, which defeats the purpose of having the canonical version of it live there in the first place.
Can anyone help with this?
In essence, no this isnโt possible in a practical method. You can get around it but youโd need a list of all the file names with the full path in a table to reference in order to make a workaround, and it wouldnโt have a folder hierarchy structure.
IF every future file can be uploaded from Appsheet then you would be able to make a system to handle it better than if you have to handle files coming in from other sources.
Not sure if it is prefered solutions with you, but why dont you let the user to install Google Drive for desktop application?
Once the appsheet opens the file picker then they can pick the files from there.
Secondly, using the tricks I recently shared with the community to list up all the file names as well as file Ids sitting in a target google drive folder in a spreasheet, then read such spreadsheet as table for your app. Then you set up enumlist selections in a filed where they pick up the rows for each files. Yes, this is not picking up the files to the app as well as backend of the app, but you can place the URL links to the selected files from appsheet app.
Thatโs a cool solution that Iโve never heard before. Have you actually used this? Does it create duplicates of the file, or does it record the file path of the original file on the Drive?
Yes, i m using to get the downloadable url and present that URL on the app. For instance, user upload the file or images from App, then this will trigger to refresh the spreasheet, i.e. to re-run the script to get the latest list of files name/file IDs.
Yah I got that, I was asking about using the Google Drive Desktop app.
Sure. I m not using Google Drive Desktop app, as it will consume the local storageโฆ
In the past, i used it, but deleted just because of that.
Itโs a clever solution, but it doesnโt tackle the fundamental UX problem.
Weโve used Google Workspace for over 5 years, and weโve trained our staff to save everything in Drive. They also know that a shared Drive is the place to look for official versions of things. This works great for us, especially for the 30% or so of our staff who use Chrome OS. A Drive file picker is something everyoneโs comfortable with.
The solutions youโve all mentioned would address the technical issue, but theyโre workaround-y, and I really resist spending time on trying to โmake it workโ. The less elegant โ but much simpler solution โ would be to just have staff copy a Drive file URL and paste it into a URL field. That would at least bring in the file Id in case thereโs a better integration down the road.
Now that AppSheet is part of Google Cloud, it really should have a native Drive file picker.
This will be amazing and is totally needed. So many things will improve with just this component.
Would love to make an official feature request. How can we make one?
I get the sense that even through AppSheet was acquired by Google theyโre operating as a separate company; Google just wanted a stake in GUI App Builder business because itโs only going to get bigger. So far they donโt treat Google as special source and only try to invest resources in building things thatโs possible in most sources.
Any news on a native Drive file/folder picker? Would love to be able to pick a folder to export files to.
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