Grandparent-parent-child relationship

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
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1

Hey there!

I am kinda new with AppSheet, plenty of history with Sheets. I am trying to build a food diary solution, but the levels of parent-child connections mess my app up. Apologies in advance for my noobiness:

  1. Person starts with view that holds added days in a list (Food diary). You can add a day or click a previous one. This step works fine with ref and day id’s.

  2. You click and open the day view that lists all the added meals (with mealID). For some reason these I still got to work just fine with prefilled cells in sheets. I ref’d up and down. But these do not connect to the last layer.

  3. FoodItemLog has the FoodItem’s with calculated values, so this is like “meal view”. For some reason, I cannot connect this to the previous view.

So from diary to days view, from day to meals view, from meal to food items view, and in there should be the form to add more items. I tried to make for each step it’s own tab in Sheets, and ref it downwards but it just seems to cut it before getting all the way. And I know, I really shouldn’t try to be this deep with my level of knowledge :sweat_smile:

2

A food diary should reference a user.

A day should reference a diary. The user will get an automatic list of days.

A meal should reference a day. The day will get an automatic list of meals.

A food item should reference a meal. The meal will get an automatic list of items.

3

Yes. This I understand, and tried it multiple times, but with no luck. For some reason the information didn’t carry through the grandparent-parent-child line.

I made multiple slices, and ended up doing just one Log in GS, and in that I put all the identifications for every layer of the app. Then I guided with slices each view, and got it to work correctly.

I will try with another app again the grandparent thing with multiple tabs in sheet, but this solution worked for me really well this time.

4

Hey! No worries, this is a common AppSheet hurdle when working with multiple parent-child levels.

The key is to link each table using Ref columns, rather than relying on prefilled cells. For example, connect Days to FoodDiary, Meals to Days, and FoodItemLog to Meals. Make sure each table has a unique Key, and each child table has a Ref column pointing to its parent’s Key. Enabling IsPartOf on the child Ref can also help you add food items directly within a meal.

Once those relationships are set up correctly, AppSheet can automatically create the related inline lists and forms. You’re closer than you think!