Inline View Adds Not Saving Parent Ref ID to Google Sheet (Is a part of? Issue)

[sarah_mcdonald]

Hi AppSheet Community,

I’m very new to Appsheets so I hope I’m able to explain my situation well.

I’m facing a challenging issue with saving related records added via an inline form view. The inline view itself now appears correctly, but the link back to the parent record isn’t being saved to the Google Sheet.

My Setup:

1. Parent Table: Deals (Key: Deal ID - Type Text)
2. Child Table: Paid HW Selections V2 (Key: Selection ID - Type Text, Initial Value UNIQUEID()) - Allows Adds.
3. Linking Column (Child->Parent): Paid HW Selections V2 has a column named Deal ID.
   • Its Type is Ref.
   • Its Source table is Deals.
   • Is a part of? is CHECKED.
   • Editable?, Require?, Initial Value, App Formula, Valid If are all unchecked/blank.
4. Virtual Column (Parent): Deals has a virtual column named Related Paid HW Selections V2s.
   • Its Type is List of Ref to Paid HW Selections V2.
   • Its App Formula is: REF_ROWS(“Paid HW Selections V2”, “Deal ID”) (Names verified).
5. View: The Deals_Form (View type: form, Data source: Deals) correctly includes Related Paid HW Selections V2s in its Column order, and the inline view with the “+ NEW” button now renders correctly.

The Problem:

When I am in the Deals_Form, click the “+ NEW” button for Related Paid HW Selections V2s, fill out the sub-form for a hardware item, and click Save (on both the sub-form and main form), a new row IS successfully added to the Paid HW Selections V2 tab in my Google Sheet. However, the Deal ID column in that new row remains blank. AppSheet is failing to automatically populate the reference back to the parent Deals record.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

• Confirmed all settings above multiple times (Keys, Refs, Is a part of? = CHECKED (including toggling off/on), permissions, REF_ROWS syntax & names).
• Confirmed no sync errors are reported.
• Confirmed no conflicting Automations/Actions.
• Manual Test: Manually adding a row to the Paid HW Selections V2 Google Sheet with a valid Deal ID does result in AppSheet correctly displaying this row as related within the parent Deals record’s Detail view. This shows the REF_ROWS function works when the link exists.
• The issue seems specific to the automatic population of the parent Ref (Deal ID) when using the inline add (Is a part of?) mechanism.

What could be preventing the Deal ID from being automatically populated during the inline save process? Is there any other setting or potential conflict I should investigate?

I will attach screenshots of the relevant settings.

Thanks!

[WillowMobileSys]

@sarah_mcdonald

Editable?, Require?, Initial Value, App Formula, Valid If are all unchecked/blank.

The Deal ID column must be editable. Turn on the Editable? property and you start seeing the Deal ID column properly filled in automatically when tapping the New button.

Why it’s not flagged as an error in the editor is confusing. I can’t think of any reason why someone would want to set the “is part of” setting and NOT have that Parent ID automatically populated. My guess it was just a design oversight.

I hope this helps!