Incoming Links Not Updating Repeatedly

Jim Hook

All,

It's good to hear that a real problem has been found and is being fixed. My sheets got a lot better today but there are still some errors. I guess just by some coincidence we had done a minor change to our API transfer software on 12/11 so today I suspected that we had done something to mess things up. Hopefully by 12/20 all my problems will be fixed. Still painful though.

Jim Hook

@Bhanu

Bhanu, I still have quite a few links not properly updating after the recent fix. Hopefully the work you are doing to update all the sheets will fix these issues. I have asked Smartsheet support to do a "refresh" on all my active sheets since that has fixed similar problems in the past.

Romain Tropée

Hi there,

I've noticed the same behaviour as well, i.e. cross linked cells are not updating although they reference the correct cell and changes are being made. I started to notice cells were slow to update in mid-december but I wouldn't be able to pinpoint when this started to happen.

Has there been any more official communication regarding this issue?

Edit: I think it is back to normal now.

Paul Newcome

@Romain Tropée This is about as "official" as I have seen on this issue. If you are still noticing problems, I recommend reaching out to support.

Jim Hook

It took about two weeks for Smartsheet to finally get to the bottom of this problem. At least for me, it was only happening when sheets were being updated via the Smartsheet API. Apparently something they did was unintentionally disabling the outgoing links from those sheets. I have four such sheets and after all of them had been "refreshed on the backend" by Smartsheet support they began working as usual. The problem started on December 10th for me and ended on December 25th, Merry Christmas to me! During that time I think support was overloaded with problems because they become unresponsive to my requests for updates.

I have extensive error checking in my smartsheet application that detects when all sorts of things stop working, as well as data entry errors, so it was easy to find the nonfunctional links but manually fixing every link everytime the data changed was quite time consuming. When I coded my application there was no alternative to using very extensive linking. I'm thinking of recoding using the more recently added functions like references to ranges in other sheets within a formula to make it less dependent on links since I have had troubles with links being slow to update in the past also.

Ezra

@Jim Hook Yes, I too use a set of reports to search the various blueprints and other workspaces for errors. One of my main reports looks for all of the #ANNOYING errors:

Jim Hook

@Ezra I don't do it the same way you do but I like what you're doing. My error checking doesn't check for #ERRORS on various Smartsheets. Instead, data gets into our project tracking system from an external (to Smartsheet) project hours tracking system plus data entry and importing data into Smartsheet via the API. For example, one set of external data is based on what people have entered on their project timesheets for the last week and current month while the other set of data is based on hours charged and remaining on our active client and internal projects. This data goes through a dozen Smartsheets before being fully processed but I verify that the end results based on data from these two paths matches exactly. If a link stops working, or a new project is created in our external application but not mirrored in Smartsheet, I get error flags because data doesn't match. That way I catch data entry errors anywhere in the system or if a link doesn't update and that's how I found the recent problem.

Ezra

Yeah.. probably a cleaner way of finding the errors. Mine will catch the "same" error on the individual project data sheets' cells and the cell-linked gantt charts' cells.

This has two benefits, in my mind. Firstly, seeing the error propagate in more than one sheet helps me error-check and solve problems in the blueprint templates for future-proofing. Secondly, it looks overwhelming when I show the managers all of the errors, but impressive when it only takes two minutes to track them down and fix them :)

Jim Hook

I see your point. I started generating error catching processes because it was taking so much time to track down errors and many times there was no clear indication that there were errors at all. Now it takes just a minute for me to see exactly where the problem is and quickly fix it unless it is caused by a Smartsheet problem. Occasionally Smartsheet will make a change to how a function works or there's an unintended consequence of some update that will generate errors. At least when that happens I can tell support exactly what the issue is.

Paul Newcome

I use error tracking as well. Certain errors can be fixed by IFERROR or picked up by ISERROR functions, and other errors will return the #BLOCKED even with one or both of those functions in place. I took advantage of this to basically insert a column for tracking that contains a formula almost designed to fail. It is something along the lines of...

=IFERROR(JOIN(COLLECT([First Column]@row:[Last Column]@row, [First Column]@row:[Last Column]@row, ISERROR(@cell))), #BLOCKED)

What this does is leaves the cell blank until there is an error and changes all errors to "#BLOCKED". This way ones that may pull through such as an #INVALID VALUE or something like that gets converted to #BLOCKED and those that can't be fixed generate a #BLOCKED anyway.

I then couple this with one more column where the first row is the only one used. I then replicate the above formula but look at my Error column instead. What this allows me to do is look across all workspaces a the same time and generate a report that pulls only a single row from each sheet that has an error on it. The only column in my report is the Sheet Name column which has the hyperlink to the sheet. I click on that then use ctrl+f on my error column to jump to the row.

Converting everything to "#BLOCKED" means that I only have to set my report criteria to look for that one error instead of @Ezra's method of building the report to look for multiple errors over multiple columns.

I know my method doesn't provide the same level of detail right away, but it works for me.

Some of the more important sheets I use an Alert to notify me of an error right away, but for the most part I just have the report sent to my email daily.