Hello, I am trying to set up mass texting via the selection feature. My app lists a series of caregivers with their mobile devices in each contact (set up as unique rows). From the UI, I would like to be able to select multiple contacts and then send a mass text to those selected contacts. The message content would NOT need to be a predefined one, but one made on the fly. There is no other trigger action for this. Is this possible?
I’ve attached a screenshot of a demo app I created. The blue highlighted caregivers are whom I would like to mass text a message to.
Not in the way you’re going about it so far. Selecting multiple rows and then selecting an action triggers that action separately for each row–i.e., not once for the group of rows.
To apply a single action simultaneously to multiple rows, you need to use a different mechanism to “select” the rows–e.g., add a Yes/No column to the table for the user to indicate whether each row is selected or select all the child rows of the current parent row.
As for configuring AppSheet’s SMS action in particular to include multiple recipients, I don’t have experience with that. If you didn’t already, search this community for information. For example, I promptly found what sounds like a very relevant discussion: Send SMS to all Mobile Numbers - Google Cloud Community .
Hello @dbaum , your post really helped me get to another solution! I got it to work by creating columns with individual phone numbers.
But is it possible to send a text with a single column that has a string of phone numbers separated by commas.
For example: Column: Phone Numbers. Cell: 18082349087,18086458788,1-8883457689
I tried but it was rejected because it wasn’t formatted as a phone number, hoping to confirm please.
Also, is there a way to create an expression where I won’t need to type in the new columns into my expression as I add more phone numbers (i.e., ,“,”,[Phone Number 7],“,”[Phone Number 8])?
CONCATENATE([PHONE NUMBER],“,”,[PHONE NUMBER 2],“,”,[PHONE NUMBER 3],“,”,[Phone Number 4],“,”,[Phone Number 5],“,”,[Phone Number 6])
Store each phone number in the same column in a dedicated table, and if necessary include in that table a column for each row to reference its parent row in another table. Then, you can use an expression that returns a list of phone numbers across rows–e.g., PhonesTable[PhoneColumn]. This may be where you started–I don’t understand enough about your use case or your data structure.
