"Group by" bug?

When creating a new expense entry from a table view grouped by the “Approved” status, the new entry is also created with the “Approved” status instead of the default “Pending” status.

Problem Description:

I have an AppSheet app for managing expenses.
Expenses have a “Status” field with two values: “Pending” and “Approved”.
When creating a new expense entry, the default status is set to “Pending” using the “Initial Value” feature.
In the table view, I group expenses by the “Status” field.
When I create a new expense entry from the “Approved” group, the new entry is also created with the “Approved” status, even though the default value is set to “Pending”.

Expected Behavior:

I expect new expense entries to always be created with the “Pending” status, regardless of which group they are created from in the table view.

Attempted Solutions:

  • Set the default value for the “Status” field to “Pending” using the “Initial Value” feature.
  • Checked the “Create new expense entry” action to ensure it is not affected by the group filter.
  • Checked workflows (if any) to ensure no steps are changing the expense entry status.
  • Checked permissions to ensure users cannot directly change the status.

Additional Information:

  • Only users with accounting permissions can change the expense entry status through a separate action.
  • Users cannot directly change the status of an expense entry in the form, including accountants.

Request for Assistance:

I hope to receive assistance from the AppSheet community to identify the cause and solution for this issue.

I get the same behavior from the system generated Add action. I guess that is how group-by is implemented.

One thing you might try is to create an action to move to a view with LINKTOFORM() to specify the desired initial status. It works “as expected” for me.

2 Likes

Do you think this is a bug? Or is this a feature of the appsheet?

Beats me.. The official documentation does not give any indication here. AppSheet is full of such cases where you just try something out and see how the system behaves and adjust as best as you can.