We have started having major sync errors which stated on Monday 22nd. On multiple apps we are getting:
“Unable to add row to table → ReadElementContentAsInt returned index value ‘0’ which is greater than _sharedStringsList count of 0”
If we go into the data source excel it appears to be corrupt, I can rewind the excel to an earlier version which allows temporary syncing but it continues to happen and we are now losing data from the apps! Note the source excel is within Dropbox.
Note that sometimes it will sync a few entries and then the above error comes up and if I rewind I can get a few more entries before it again has issues.
We haven’t made any changes to any of the apps and it has been working seamlessly for years but this is causing major headaches and reliability issues with the loss of data.
Can anyone offer any insight?
Has something been updated by appsheet over the weekend?
Two red flags that jump right out to me are (1) Excel and (2) Dropbox. While both are supported, they are not among the better choices if your app is complex, heavily used, or handles a lot of data. That your app has worked fine for years suggests you may have accumulated enough data to reach a limit.
Or AppSheet developers made a change that broke things. They make changes just about every day and do not announce them.
The error you cited is an internal error, whatever the case, and is not something you, as the app creator, can address yourself. You will need to engage Support, and Support will need to escalate to Engineering (developers).
For the long-term, I recommend you consider moving your data sources to Google Sheets or an SQL database. Google Sheets is much better engineered for use as a data store by AppSheet than Excel is. Of course, an SQL database is the best choice, but incurs a considerable expense.
We tend to clear the source excel’s on a weekly basis so the guys using it are working on a blank data source.
I shall reach out to support to see if they have any solutions in the short term but I will work on moving sources over to Google Sheets to see if it helps stabilise the issue. It’s on of these things that we set up around 6 years ago and because it was working and not broke we haven’t touched it.