Is the result of ANY expression predictable?

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Well, don’t be fooled by the post title
I know that the ANY expression returns an arbitrary value of the given list, and an arbitrary item cannot be predicted, but what I need is to fill the columns of a new record when creating an action of type “Data: Add a new row to another table using values from this row”.
Since I am in a loop, I am using the well known trick of adding an arbitrary missing item:

Property = ANY(Property[ID] - SELECT(...))

The fact is that I also need to assign another column that depends on this Property assigned in the same run. So, the question is if I am guaranteed that using another time the same expression will lead to the same result:

Property2 = CONCATENATE(ANY(Property[ID] - SELECT(...)), ", Foo")

I know that I can instead use the expression:

Property = ANY(TOP(SORT(Property[ID] - SELECT(...),TRUE),1))

And this will always work, but I prefer to avoid all this, if it’s not necessary

2

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3

Hi Steve
thanks for the super-fast answer, but in this case I think that your quotation doesn’t apply, because the list is generated with the SELECT statement

4

index(your select expression, randambeween())

may get the authentic randam result instead of any expressin nor index 1.

5

Please explain in plain language what you’re trying to accomplish here.

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