Getting started!

App Building
1

Hi! I am new to retool and app building. I have two important questions:

  1. How do I open a new workspace? I do not see an option to actually do anything after I do the onboarding mini module
  2. I have a google sheet that I would like to open, but every time I tried to connect upon onboarding, I just looped right back to the beginning after giving retool access to my google data
1 Like
2

Hey @WillyGolden and welcome to the community!

For (1) - if you mean app, you can create a new one by heading to your Retool homepage (if you’re in your onboarding app - click the 3 dots at the top left and then “home”) and clicking “create new” - there are a few different ways to create apps, from scratch, via a template, cloning another app, etc.

For (2) - you can’t exactly open a Google Sheet directly in Retool - you need to work with it programatically. A typical use case is querying the sheet and displaying the results in a Retool table component - we have a walkthrough example in our docs here.

Let me know if this helps!

3

This does help! I think I’m trying to do things a bit more programmatically than it seems I am able to do. I’ll give an example: I’m trying to create a drop down whose inputs are automatically generated from the text in a field. How would I do that?

Another possible example:

I want to program a button to list out all values from the first column whose column three = [some value]. Is that possible to do?

4

Sure, pretty much anything is possible in Retool!

You can reference component values programmatically. So if you wanted your Dropdown values to reference the value of a text input, in the “values” field for your Dropdown, you could put {{ textinput.value }}. Anything in {{ }} evaluates to Javascript, so if you wanted to split a comma separated list into an array for example (Dropdown values need to be an array), you could use {{ textinput.value.split(',') }}

Once you get the hang of referencing component properties things should fall in place.