Google Spreadsheets missing basic features

Workflows
1

Some basic features are missing:

  • Delete all rows from a page (Please don't tell me to update all columns to blank value, that's not a solution)
  • Rename a page (sheet)
  • Check if a single row is present in a page (sheet)
  • Upsert rows (this is implemented at N8N, so, it's feasible)

I'm a bit disappointed with Retool. Integrations are very shallow, and you need to create a generic HTTP request box for almost everything :confused:

2

Hello @airton_incognia!

Thank you for the helpful suggestions on how we can improve Retool :smile:

There is a Action for deleting single rows, you could run this in a for loop where you feed in an ID for each row. I would imagine we limit the scope of tools of mass deleting to protect users from accidents :sweat_smile:

Renaming a page/sheet is a bit trickier as if we have other retool queries that reference the page/sheet in question then we would have to update all of them on changes to keep every resource/query from then breaking.

What criteria would you like to use for checking if a single row is present in a sheet? Would you like it to be by primary key(ID)?

The bulk upsert is a request we have logged from other users. As we do have it for other DB resources. I can add you +1 to this request.

There are possible work arounds where you can implement the same logic by iterating through rows, if a row exists with the same key as one you are looking to update, then run an update query and if the row does not exists to run an 'add row' query. This can be done in workflows and with JS code blocks in apps as well :slightly_smiling_face:

3

Hi @Jack_T, thanks for the response.

  1. I don't think that "protect users from accident" is a good motivation for not implementing mass deletion. My company uses retool and N8N, and N8N has this feature. It's very easy to clean up a sheet!
  2. About renaming a page/sheet, all references should point to the ID and not the name. This is an action offered by Google's API, why should not offer it? It has several use cases.
  3. One column that is chosen to be the ID.
  4. Thanks for pointing it up! I will vote on it for sure!
  5. Iterating over all rows can be problematic if the sheet is very large.

Cheers!

4

Additionally, I think that retool has many things to learn from N8N.

The integrations have many more boxes available, and it has more flexibility for running not non-implemented routes.

On the other side, N8N has a lot to learn with retool on other aspects

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5

Thank you again for all the feedback! Just tagged your requests on to some outstanding requests for GSheets integrations.

Unfortunately the are not super high on the eng team's priority list as we have a lot of features being built but your req will help put more weight to these tickets.

I had a former job use N8N and realize their product is very similar to Retool, will definitely be seeing how we can push to compete with them :eyes:

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