Enable Autosave for Published Sheet (edit by anyone)

I have several sheets whose sole purpose in Smartsheet is to live on a dashboard as published web content and provide a dropdown with names. When the name is selected, it brings up a link to a form URL with the name information URL queried into it. After the link is clicked, a new name is picked from the dropdown to generate another URL.

I am running into an issue where the users of these sheets are breaking the sheets with an ajax -1 error code by not saving/refreshing and breaking the sheet because of it, as published sheets do not provide information about the sheet being updated nor do publish sheets auto-save. In this case, the sheets have dropdown options updated every 30 minutes by the API.

Does anyone have a workaround for this issue without sending the users to the non-published version of the sheets?

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Accepted answers

Genevieve P.

Hey @SteyJ

This is a very interesting use-case! It doesn't look like other members have any suggestions. I personally would have suggested sharing them to the sheet.

I haven't tested this, but what if you set up a hidden checkbox column that is programmatically checked or un-checked either by Bridge or using the Smartsheet API to refresh the sheet? Similar to this process but at a faster rate (e.g. every 5 minutes):

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2481992-schedule-daily-sheet-save

Cheers,
Genevieve

All comments

Genevieve P.

Hey @SteyJ

This is a very interesting use-case! It doesn't look like other members have any suggestions. I personally would have suggested sharing them to the sheet.

https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2481992-schedule-daily-sheet-save

Cheers,
Genevieve

SteyJ

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/449613#Comment_449613

Thanks @Genevieve P. It definitely is not a normal use case for a sheet… lol

One of my primary issues is that a lot of the 'front end' users using the sheet do not understand saving regularly — So even if I programmatically save the sheet, it creates a new 'checkpoint' of the sheet which is not updated on the end users side, and when the end user doesn't save for a prolonged period, the end user and the sheet itself become about 30 versions apart and it completely shuts down the sheet with the ajax error code described.

I would love to share the sheet itself with the end users, but the sheet itself is in a workspace that cannot be moved to a workspace the end users are a part of.

Genevieve P.

Ah, very good point! It's a very creative solution but yes, it sounds like you are coming up against a limitation of the publishing-with-edit permissions.

I suppose there's no way you could use formulas in a different sheet to reference everything you're doing in this sheet, meaning you could store it in a place where it could be shared?

In the meantime, it would be good for the Product Team to hear about your use-case! Please add your vote and a comment to this related Idea: Auto Refresh of Published Dashboards

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