I wanted to create an if, then statement in Google Sheets that would yield an email address based on the responses in a specific field of a form. Here's my sheet. I would like for the room preference column (FormResponses1!K) to generate an email address (Staff!A) based on the criteria in (Staff!C:P). That way I can get an email address for the point person in charge of scheduling a room.
I attempted to form a test logic for just one of the room schedulers to no avail (parse error): =if(K3=Staff!C2:J2,U3=Staff!A2). Any help will be appreciated.
At the risk of sounding obvious, how attached are you to using an IF() spreadsheet function?
Seems to me like you'd get more mileage out of calling custom function roomOwners() from the cell which returns the array or big-long-string of values you're looking for.
I'd approach the problem by storing the value of the room preference from your form into a variable.
Then I'd iterate over the list of staff members, for each staffer, checking all rooms for equality with the preference variable.
Whenever the iteration finds a match, it pushes the email address of the matching staffer to an array.
At the end of the iteration, return the array, filled with all your matches.
If you're concerned about the answer being written to multiple cells, you could always string-ify the array...
Related
I am working with a data set that has a secondary index with a sort key that ultimately has user entered information in it. For the sake of the question, consider it a "postal address" field. This model is to permit quick queries of this data for a particular postal address.
Because it is user entered I am finding myself wanting to regularize it before using it as a key. For instance, by stripping spaces and making it a common case. My thinking being that if someone made a trivial capitalization or spacing error it wouldn't be identified as a different address.
Is this a pattern that people typically do if they are creating a key on user entered data? Are "user entered keys" considered harmful? Any obvious pitfalls?
Just make sure you get your normalization function right. Simply stripping spaces might not be a great idea. For example, Hight Railroad and High Trail Road might both normalize to hightrailroad which probably isn't what you want. Instead, you might want to replace one or more consecutive spaces with a single dash or something along those lines.
If you get the normalization right, you should be fine. Others have mentioned vulnerabilities related to overwriting data but you said that this is a Global Secondary Index. You can't write to a GSI so you don't need to worry about this. Also, the user entered data is the sort key. As long as you control the hash key, you will be fine.
One thing I would be cautious of is the data distribution. Any time there is a user-influenced key whether it be direct user input or a side effect of a user action such as a timestamp, you need to take care to avoid unbalanced data distributions which could lead to hot shards and/or throttling
I am creating an excel sheet with following Data Validation drop down list.
NA
Done
(add some formula here)
Basically, i will be able to select either plain text "NA"/ "Done" from the dropdown list. But sometimes, I want the user to be able to calculate some values based on the cell respective to the row selected so, I want to have one formula as a choice inside the data validation dropdown list. Is this possible?
Data Validation List Source
When I click on Formulae option, it should execute the formula with respect to the cells in that Row
But currently, the formula that i put in doesn't execute, instead it will just show the whole formula in the cell when activated.
1)How can i make it so that when i select the formula from data validation list, it will execute it instead of filling up the cell with it?
2)How do i set the formula so that it will be using the cell from the current Row? (for example, if i am using the data validation List in N60, the formula should adapt itself to use the cell (let's say A60?).
I may not be able to help with the second part, but I was seeking an answer to the first and discovered a solution/workaround using Name Manager.
First, in Formula > Name Manager, create a new reference (the "refers to" will contain whatever formula you are wishing to ultimately display in the validation list. For this example, we use the formula reference "=IF($H54=..." and Name it "UniqueName"
Now, we go into Data Validation, Select List, and input the three items we want displayed in the list, with an equals sign preceding our newly named reference: ie. "NA,Done,=UniqueName"
Note: You can't start with the =UniqueName or validation will try to read it all as a formula and fail.
This method will allow the user to display "NA", "Done", or "=UniqueName" in the cell; if "=UniqueName" is selected, the cell itself will interpret this as a formula and execute it accordingly, displaying the results of "=IF($H54=...", or whateverelse you have designated to use as a named formula.
If it's too late for yours, I hope this helps someone else who may face a similar problem.
While I think I know what you're trying to say. Why don't you just use an IF formula to evaluate everything instead of selecting a drop down for every row manually. You already had it partially solved using IF. Just need to add the criteria for a "Done" and an "NA"
=if(A1="date","Done",if(A1<"date","NA",if(something else until you have all your catergories))
Just going to piggyback off of Mark's response.
If you really needed your named formula to be the first selection in the list, you can setup your list with a leading comma like so:
,=UniqueName,NA,Done
That worked out for my use, and there was no null item listed in the Data Validation drop down. Hope that helps!
I am making a web form for people to sign up for an event. I found that I can use Google form and Google spreadsheet for this task, and I started to learn how to use these web applications. I would also like to send the automatic confirmation e-mail to those who have signed up. For this task, I am also looking into the Google Apps Script. As far as I understand, I should define a function to send e-mail in a script in the spreadsheet and trigger this function at 'Form Submission Event'. I would like to identify the e-mail address of a person who signed up from the data he/she submitted, and I would like to include all the submitted data as well as the time stamp in the confirmation e-mail.
My questions are the following.
How can I identify the cell in the spreadsheet into which the value of an input field in the Form is stored?
Or, is there any way that I can read the values of the respective input fields from a Google Apps Script?
I would be glad if you could kindly refer me to an unambiguous API reference related to these questions.
So far I learned about the applications from the help pages provided in Google Drive,
e.g.
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/overview
However, I feel documents there are too concise.
I am learning how to send confirmation e-mail from this Google Apps Script:
FormSubmissionResponseEmail
I could not find a help document that explicitly relates an input field in a Google form and a cell in the Google spreadsheet. From my limited number of experiment cases, it seems that the time stamps are always stored in the first column of the spreadsheet. Is this guaranteed? It seems that 'namedValues' member of the 'Spreadsheet Form Submit Events' class is said to contain "the question names and values from the form submission." (https://developers.google.com/apps-script/understanding_events)
However, when I modified the Google form, the 'namedValues' member still held the elements corresponding to deleted input fields. Is there any way to loop over only those elements in 'namedValues' that corresponds to the fields actually input by a user?
I would also be glad to hear about alternative tools to replace Google form and Google spreadsheet.
This answer applies to the "new Forms", the 2013 version, not "Legacy Forms" which have been discontinued.
How can I identify the cell in the spreadsheet into which the value of
an input field in the Form is stored?
You can identify the column that will collect answers to a form question by the label in row 1. Armed with that knowledge, you can reference the answers by column number in functions such as getRange().
...is there any way that I can read the values of the respective input
fields from a Google Apps Script?
There are multiple ways to reference input values:
As you found in Understanding Events, using a function triggered by Form Submission you can retrieve input values from the event itself. Two options here; you get a set of values in an array, and namedValues that you can reference using the question text as a name.
You can read the data from the spreadsheet; within that same trigger function mentioned earlier, you could use e.range.getValues() to get an array with all the submitted values, which you could then reference by index. Remember that this would be a 0-based array, while the column numbering starts at 1.
From my limited number of experiment cases, it seems that the
timestamps are always stored in the first column of the spreadsheet.
Is this guaranteed?
Unless you modify the spreadsheet, the timestamp will be in the first column. It is possible to insert columns to the left of the data table created by Forms, which will affect where you would find your form results in the sheet (although e.range will adjust). The order of all following values will be the order that the questions were created in the form. Note that if you delete a column (because you removed the question from the form, say), the column for the "deleted" question will be recreated at the end of the row.
...when I modified the Google form, the 'namedValues' member still
held the elements corresponding to deleted input fields. Is there any
way to loop over only those elements in namedValues that corresponds
to the fields actually input by a user?
There are reasons for remembering past questions, although they are just a bother when they weren't used to collect any real data. Better planning can be used to avoid the problem!
Unanswered questions will be empty strings in the event (e.g. e.namedValues["Dead Question"] == ''). So you could skip them like this:
for (var ans in e.namedValues) {
if (e.namedValues[ans] != '') {
doSomethingWith(e.namedValues[ans]
}
}
Note, too, that you can get array of "headers", or the form questions, like this:
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var headers = sheet.getDataRange().getValues()[0];
...and then use a search of headers to find the column containing the answer you're looking for.
Assume that I have a list of employee names from a database (thousands, potentially tens-of-thousands in the near future). To make the problem simpler assume that each firstname/lastname combination is unique (a big if, but a tangent).
I also have a RSS stream of news content that pertains to the business (again, could be in the hundreds of items per day).
What I would like to do is detect if an employees name appears in the several paragraph news item and, if so, 'tag' the item with the person its talking about.
There may be more than one employee named in a single news item so breaking the loop after the first positive match isn't a possibility.
I can certainly brute force things: for every news item, loop over each and every employee name and if a regex expression returns a match, make note of it.
Is there a simpler way in ColdFusion or should I just get on with my nested loops?
Just throwing this out there as something you could do...
It sounds like you'll almost unanimously have significantly more employee names than words per post. Here's how I might handle it:
Have an always-running CF app that will pull in the feeds and onAppStart
Grab all employees from your db
Create an app-scoped look up struct with first names as keys and a struct of last names as values ( you could also add middle names sibling to last names with a 3rd tier if desired ).
So one key in the look up might be "Vanessa" with a struct with 2 keys ( "Johnson" and "Forta" ) as its value.
Then, each article you parse, just listToArray with a space as a delimiter and loop through the array doing a simple structKeyExists with each token. For matches, check the next item in the array as a last name.
I'd guess this would be much more performant processingwise than doing however many searches and also take almost no time to code and you can feed in any future sources extremely simply ( your checker takes one argument, any text on Earth ).
Interested to see what route you go and whether your experiments expose anything new about performance in CF.
Matthew, you have a tall order there, and there are really multiple parts to the challenge/solution. But just in terms of comparing a list of values to a given set of text to see if one of them occur in there, you'll find that there's no one could CF function. BEcause of that, I created a new one, findList, available at cflib:
http://cflib.org/index.cfm?event=page.udfbyid&udfid=1908
It's not perfect, nor as optimal as it could be, but it may be a useful first step or you, or give you some ideas. That said, it suited my need (determine if a given blog comment had reference to any of the blacklisted words). I show it comparing a list of URLs, but it could be any words at all. Hope that's a little helpful.
Another option worth exploring is leveraging the Solr engine that ships with CF now. It will do the string search heavy lifting for you and you can probably focus on dynamically keeping your collections up to date and optimized as new feed items come in.
Good luck!
I'm trying to find the best way to go about my problem and I would love your input. I am trying to allow users to scan multiple barcodes into a text area. After they are submitted they are split into an array. The user then inputs how many iterations of each value in the array are to be inserted into a MySQL database. I've achieved this using PHP and session variables, looping through the array one step at a time. With Django I've found it a little more difficult and I am wondering if I should just have a "temporary" table in my database that gets refilled with the values from the array of barcodes. The following pages then pull each value from the table instead of using any sort of session variables.
Edit:
I apologize for the confusing question. Let me try and clear it up a bit:
I need to render a view based on each value in the user-submitted array. When it is first submitted, a view is rendered for the first value. When the user hits "Next" a view will be rendered for the second value in the array, and so on.
As for the database issue, each value can have two "types." The user will declare how many of each type is added to the database in each of the views I am trying to render.
Thank you.
this is nothing about django.
forget that temporary table.
add a field "filled" to ur table
select 1st not-filled row, and show "refill" page by this row
then update user input number back to db, set "filled" to "true" at same time.
You probably can port your PHP solution using a Django session object.
I'm not sure if that "one item at a time" is a feature or a "it was easier to code that way" thing, but in the second case - you may want to use Django Formsets to display all items at once and avoid looping through the array.