Google Form (as a data source) -- New Integration

General General Discussion
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Hey everyone

In case you missed it, last Friday (5/3/24) AppSheet announced a new intergration between Google Forms and AppSheet.

The real power here is that you can use the submission of the form as a direct trigger for an automation.

Here is an example from the announcement

  • It shows how a form submission can send something to a chat.

exmaple

My Test

Earlier the same day of the announcement, I had literally just created a new Google Form (to make it easier for my Apprentices to add topics to their upcoming meetings), and went through the process of working with Appster to create a script that would take the form contents and throw them at the Answer Portal’s API.

  • This took me about an hour from start to finish; reconfiguring my system to allow for records created through this new mechanism, building the script, making the automation, testing things out.

I then went off to lunch…

During the break read the new announcement about how we can now use a Google Form to trigger a bot… and I’m like, “Well… I’m gonna have to try that out now! haha”

The process was unbelievably simple:

  1. Add the form as a data source
    MultiTech_0-1714848650423.png
  2. Create a new automation on the submission of the form
    • You can even access the form values in the automation criteria filter - just like a normal automation!
    • So you can conditionalize when an automation should run off the values submitted in the form!
      MultiTech_1-1714848683485.png
  3. Made a task that takes the form fields and maps them into a preexisting table by creating a new record
    MultiTech_3-1714848736995.png

    • You have direct access to the form fields, just like they were columns from a normal table. :muscle:
      MultiTech_2-1714848726794.png

    • So all I had to do was select what field (in the Google Form) should go into what column (in my regular table).

When I submit in the form, it kicks the bot - which then creates the record in the other table!

  • This actually simplified things a ton, as I wouldn’t need to do the reconfiguring of my system to accept the data from the API.

How will you use this?

This feature will open up a TON of functionality; what do you think you might be able to use this for?

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Does it mean that anybody that has a link to the form even if they are not one of my app paid users can interact with the app? If so then it’s great cause i finally have a way to collect data without paying google per each user

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:laughing:

Indeed!

This is totally a #GameChanger

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All that remains now is a way to sync google sheets with a cloud database and we dont have to pay google thousands of dollars :smiley:

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Well… you can execute a parallel operation to add or edit every time the sheet is modified by the app - create a web hook that sends the new record or the updates to the record to your cloud database.

  • @razinami have you tried something like that?
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Haven’t tried that…
Do you know if the google cloud DB has a sand box in which i can test it without paying them for an enterprise plan or whatever they call it now?

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As i think more of the forms, do you think that it would be possible that the app could send a link to a specific user email and since his email is in one of the columns, the form could have unique columns to fill? (Show/Hide)

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To be honest I’m not sure. One would hope that there is some sort of test environment, but I have never looked for it and just spun up a new sequel server and just ran with it.

It doesn’t appear that there is any way to get AppSheet to communicate to the form, and Google forms is not necessarily the place to do any kind of complicated things.

  • I don’t think you can conditionally show or hide a form column based on a formula like you can an AppSheet.
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To be honest, I just see this as a way to replace the most frequent use of a Publisher Pro app. Maybe they noticed how inpractical it is and also the fact that people tend to use it with some custom-made login which goes against ToS.
I’m not too exited because I can see the limits right away.
I guess once we can create this forms on the go through an AppSheet Bot things are gonna get interesting, because we could do what @razinami was asking and more.
I can see use cases where I’d send a form via email or similar to someone for them to complete data or provide data (like recurrent monthly data) without they being users of the app.
For those of us who are non-Google users, this would be the closest to the Gmail AMP integration that I have never used

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Well, we can use google apps script to generate forms… perhaps we can use that functionality

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But in order for the form submission to trigger anything inside the app, the form has to be connected to the app as a data source. Which means that the form has to already be created and kind of finalized ahead of time.

So at this stage this option probably is a no.

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