How to add identifying information during a csv upload?

[Andrew_Caffrey]

My situation is fairly common for lab instruments. Data containing hundreds or thousands of rows gets automatically spit into a csv without any identifying information whatsoever. 

The appsheet csv upload action in behaviors is great at scraping the data from each csv; however, I can't seem to figure out a way to have appsheet tag this data for me.

For a fake but practical example here is what an instrument might spit out into a csv:

temperature (C)	time (s)
15	1
20	2
25	3

I would like the result to be the following as I upload the csv:

Experiment Name	Date	Experimenter	ID	Temperature (C)	Time (s)
Temp Test 1	24-03-2022	John Doe	adsfsd	15	1
Temp Test 1	24-03-2022	John Doe	ewrtre	20	2
Temp Test 1	24-03-2022	John Doe	qwewv	25	3

ID and Date are fairly easy using UNIQUEID() and TODAY(), but the Experiment Name and Experimenter not so much.

In a perfect world I could have something like this app, but I don't think this is in the scope of the upload csv capabilities given it is an action. I do know this data can be technically brute forced and manually added to each csv prior to uploading, but I want to make this as automated as possible so that each new user requires little to no training to use the app.

I am going to keep exploring options either with a grouped action, parent/child tables, or bots to see if I can make something work. As I do that, I hope that someone may have insights on how to accomplish this already and can comment on this post. 

Thanks everyone!

[Andrew_Caffrey]

So I more or less got a working system. I made two tables. One that has only one editable row and another to upload the csv. In the csv table, I have it use the initial values for the relevant columns in the first table. It isn't perfect since it still requires two separate screens a user needs to be aware of two different screens. 

[Marc_Dillon]

I think what you described is exactly what I was going to suggest. You'd need some way to tell the app what the appropriate Experiment Name and Experimenter values are. How else would the app know what to put there besides you telling it? Perhaps combine your two views into one dashboard so that it is all on the same screen.

[Andrew_Caffrey · Accepted solution]

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@Marc_Dillon wrote:

How else would the app know what to put there besides you telling it?

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Exactly, this is fairly normal as computers are not smart. They need that info. I just could not wrap my head around how to get that on the same page like the example app that I have linked in the post.

Regardless, I did not think of a dashboard view. That is great idea and should do exactly what I want (i.e. make it as intuitive as possible for a new user to add identifiers prior to the upload)

@Marc_Dillon, yep took the dashboard view for a whirl, this is exactly what I could use here for the UX. Although the I cannot seem to get the csv upload action to be on the dashboard view. I will play around with it and see if I can figure that out

Edit: Nvm this link was helpful to get the action overlayed onto the dashboard