CAN WE GET AN EXPLANATION about this New Error: Expression Depth Limit...

[MultiTech]

For the past week or so, I’ve had reports from people saying something to the effect of

• I’m getting an error saying my expression is exceeding a depth limit

This is relatively new, seeing as I’ve been building apps for however long, with crazy depth inside formulas, and never have I encountered this particular error

• Is this some new wording for a circular definition error?

(We’ve looked hard for these, and didn’t find any - not saying they’re not possibly there, just that we spent hours looking for things like this and didn’t find anything.)

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WHY THE COMMUNITY DESERVES AN EXPLANATION

• There was no notice about this change
• There’s no documentation about “your formulas can only be so deep” or “your formulas can only include so many layers”
  • In fact, that exact error string is not found inside the documentation at all
• It causes our apps to break, and there’s NO way around it

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It’s like the Apps Script people suddenly deciding they’re going to limit the number of sub routines you can include inside a script file.

• But they didn’t tell anyone about the change
• They just made the change, in the dark, quietly, behind the scenes
• Without telling anyone outside their inner circle

Then suddenly people start receiving errors about “your function has exceeded the depth limit” - and there’s no way to know what’s going on, how to fix things, where you need to adjust… nada.

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I’ve come to a screeching halt in production on certain apps, as have clients of mine. We’ve tried working together for hours, looking for some way around this problem so we can get back to a green state, but we can’t.

Even with the depth of my knowledge and experience with this platform… I can’t find a way around this - and it’s breaking apps.

This has caused so much disruption, I’m getting the feeling from more than a handful of people that they’re just about ready to abandon the platform altogether; when system-level changes are made like this, without even whisper that something was going to go down, and people are building mission-critical software… Things like this just aren’t acceptable.

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https://support.google.com/appsheet/search?hl=en&q=expression%20depth%20limit&from_promoted_search=true

https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&filter=location&location=category:appsheet&q=expression%20depth%20limit

• The formula above is ridiculously simple, compared to things I’ve done in the past
• If THIS is causing a break… I’m scared to even open the other apps that have deeper things than this - for fear I’m going to break them.

[WillowMobileSys]

@MultiTech

It doesn’t seem that the expression in the error matches the one you seem to think is causing an issue.

I hope you contacted support ASAP as soon as the error was identified as consistently happening?.

Your message seems to imply you think this was some recent change in limitations. But, it could be

1. a bug was introduced.
2. a data driven issue - meaning that the size of the data being processed might contribute to the problem. One day it was fine but the next day there had been just a few more records/data elements added to put the processing beyond limits. These are nasty to unravel. It could be a number of rows issue, a number of levels issue (think linked lists) or maybe it IS a circular reference but the circle is so big that the system doesn’t recognize it as circular.

[SkrOYC]

@MultiTech

I’m getting the feeling from more than a handful of people that they’re just about ready to abandon the platform altogether

You are not wrong

[anonymous]

@MultiTech
I’m getting the same error message.

What confuses me even more is that I have used an almost identical expression in another column without getting this error message for that column.

After some trial and error, I identified one virtual column in my expression that triggered the error message. The problem was solved once I converted it from a virtual column to a standard one.

[Steve]

Please post a screenshot of the complete expression referenced by the error message.

[MultiTech]

In the post

[WillowMobileSys]

@MultiTech

I am seeing this in the sample error message:

But I am not seeing the full expression represented anywhere in the original post.

It doesn’t match with this one that is in your post:

[Koichi_Tsuji]

@MultiTech Thank you Matt for reporting this.

I have been seeing the exactly same problem, which is annoying. We have to cease the development process.

I have registered support ticket formally (not yet responded though). This is obviously newly introduced bug in terms of AppSheet expression parser, no doubt.

@Steve

[Koichi_Tsuji]

@MultiTech

Weird enough.

Yesterday, my expression (slightly deeply heavy) returned the error which is similar with yours.

Now I tested the same expression today with the same app, but it went through without throwing any errors.

I m confused, but curious what is happening with your apps.

@Steve

@Aleksi

@takuya_miyai

[Steve]

It’s possible a daily deployment caused problems and was rolled-back. Sometimes it can take a while to notice problems.

[MultiTech]

I believe this is a wrapper for a circular definition error; but like @WillowMobileSys was thinking, perhaps it’s so deep it’s not overtly obvious.

I’m thinking that’s what was going on in my case. I had maybe 4 layers of things going on, and one of them was calling back to a slice (essentially calling itself).

So in my case, it looks like it was a circular definition problem.

[QREW_Ben]

My client called me and told me they were experiencing this error. We were not making changes at the time, the biggest table is 309 rows.

This is the worst expression. It is attached to a bot, I tried to disable the bot and that did not help the issue.

This is everything I got from the error (logs show the same thing) so I am not even sure this is the right one.

I have definitely written worse expressions than the ones in this app and have definitely had bigger datasets. I am not sure why I am getting this error, but need help ASAP.

EDIT: I have also checked apps from other client, and our internal apps, with beefier expressions and bigger datasets and they are not having these problems.

UPDATE: Now the error says:

[SkrOYC]

This makes no sense at all (the error, not your post)

What does the Launch log analyzer show?

[QREW_Ben]

They all say this

[SkrOYC]

For sure something is going on in the backend. I’m glad I haven’t had the issue because I have multiple columns with nested SELECT() on some apps (Real columns, not VC)

Are you using slices with those SELECT()?

[QREW_Ben]

Not with these selects. Some of my slices have a select, but I would say they are all simpler than this.

[WillowMobileSys]

Now that there has been 3 App Creators in such a short period of time getting very similar UNUSUAL messages I have to now suspect that a bug has been introduced.

Since it sound like this error is halting app activity with no workaround, this needs escalated and resolved PRONTO before it begins affecting more apps.

Has anyone who has submitted this issue to AppSheet support received any kind of response or otherwise have more details about what is happening? Tickets should be opened as critical and everyone getting the error should open one.

@Steve

[Rob_Just]

I am escalating this to the engineering team at this moment. I will provide an update once they have reviewed and responded.

[QREW_Ben]

I will let my client it is being worked on. Thank you!

[QREW_Ben]

Any updates?