Spontaneous generation of new sheets

Leslie Kuhlman

Smartsheet issue with spontaneous generation of new sheets.

1 - We created a self-test on our company websites.

2 - Once the test form is created it is directly integrated with Smartsheet.

3 - Once the integration is connected, we completed a sample submission, and the repository is generated.

4 - Once the repository is generated a team member builds out some additional columns and automated workflows for lead outreach and tracking. 

We initial built this system in 2021 and it worked with one site with no issues at all. We now rolled it out to our other twenty websites with two self-tests on each website as of the fall of 2022.

HERE IS THE ISSUE:

These repositories will work for months with no issues at all. In the last four month or so randomly with no notification new sheets are being automatically generated by the API without any explanation.

Once the new sheet is created, no data is going into the original sheet. This breaks all of our workflows and share settings which is greatly problematic.

We have noticed a few things that have caused issues.

1        Moving the repository into a workspace breaks the API connection to the webform thus leaving the webform API connection to generate a new repository.

2        Moving ownership from one admin to another breaks the API connection to the webform thus leaving the webform API connection to generate a new repository.

We have since stopped moving the repositories into workspaces and have maintained the ownership by the original admin. Yet these new auto generated repositories keep being generated. It is like a glitch or bug is now in the system. As seen in the picture above, all with the same name.

What is going on??!

Paul Newcome

I would definitely suggest having the API code reviewed in detail. I've not seen the API create sheets without some code written in to create sheets even if it was unintentionally built in. It sounds to me like it may be more on the web form side of things and how the connection to the form and repository was built. You should be able to connect to a specific sheet that has already been created instead of having the API create it.