Questions about Bridge from a potential newbie

@Kelly Moore thanks for the shout out :-) but I'm not sure I can help more than what's already been posted.

@Julie Fortney in general Bridge is an API tool. You can setup multi-branched workflows in Bridge with pre-set API calls and utilities. You can also do custom HTTP calls to any API that you have access to in the cloud. So anything you can do with API calls you can do with Bridge. It also, importantly, allows you to run Javascript code using the results of your API calls, and to trigger workflows on changes to Smartsheet content or on any other webhook that you can receive from other tools.

There's a fair amount of Smartsheet API methods that are prebuilt into Bridge, but not all of them. So if you're looking at the Bridge documentation for Smartsheet integrations and not finding what you need, you can also look at the Smartsheet API documentation to see if there's something there to help you out. If you find an API method to use that's not already pre-built as an integration, then you can use the Custom HTTP Call step to directly call the API. You just have to provide the Smartsheet API with an API token, which you can assign to yourself in your Personal Settings.

It looks like your specific questions were answered pretty comprehensively by Kelly and Samuel but here's my 2c:

1. Because you cannot adjust report filters using the Smartsheet API, you cannot do this with Bridge. Here's the Reports methods. You might want to consider a workaround for the process of having reports hand-updated with new job numbers. Perhaps leverage a creation date or flag new items with a checkbox that's cleared once the conditions are met that would cause the project to fall back off the report? You can also explore the "contact has any of current user" filter to pick up specific jobs for the viewer?
2. You could definitely use Bridge to read one sheet on a schedule or trigger, perform calculations using Javascript or the included utilities, and post the results. It may be faster and more stable than a huge number of formulas in Smartsheet, but I'm not 100% sure it would be. I would probably first explore using Data Mesh, which is setup to do this in a much more friendly way. If you don't already use Data Mesh, it's basically a batch index/match tool.
3. As Samuel said, there's no API for updating widgets on a dashboard or retrieving a form URL. Also, I tested copying a dashboard and sheet in a common folder, where the form link was embedded in the dash, and unfortunately it does not update the form link. Seems like a gap and would be a good enhancement request. You could potentially work around this by having a common sheet with the form to capture entries, have a dropdown in that form for the project name that you can keep updated with Bridge, do a lookup to the sheet ID that the entry should go to on a sheet that Bridge maintains, and then copy the form responses into the individual project sheets using Bridge. I know that's pretty roundabout.
4. As Samuel and Kelly said, you can push dropdown updates through Bridge, it works better than Data Shuttle. You wouldn't need to maintain a separate lookup sheet though, if you create a report that contains the dropdown columns across your various created sheets, and then read that report with Bridge, the return from the API includes the source sheet ID and column ID for each report row. You can then leverage that to point Bridge at the right columns across your sheets without having to maintain a separate lookup.

At Iron Mountain we use Bridge for a variety of use cases, here's the most effective ones:

• Dropdown updates. These happen instantly with Bridge, rather than waiting for Data Shuttle to do this on a schedule. We have a handful of dropdowns on different sheets that use Bridge. I'm also working on a workflow that reads three different lists from three different sheets, and combines them into a single dropdown.
• Clear a sheet on a schedule, or as part of another Bridge workflow
• Integrate with Smartsheet Resource Management: We use SRM to capture project assignments and do billing. Using Bridge I read assignment, project, and user data into Smartsheet sheets for monthly analysis, which triggers Smartsheet to run Pivots, Data Meshes, and put it all together into a dashboard. I also push new projects into RM when approved and provisioned by Control Center. (note - we do this with Bridge rather than with CC because CC links the project for task synchronization, which we're not doing). And we archive RM users when they are flagged by managers.
• Integrate with ServiceNow: We run approvals and tracking for Procurement through Smartsheet, then push new catalog Requests into ServiceNow for the Finance team to complete their pieces. We then read back variable data to Smartsheet to track status of the procurement in one spot...Smartsheet.
• Integrate with Gitlab: Project Managers identify epic IDs on task rows in the project schedules. Bridge then reads the dates and labels from Gitlab and posts the content into the project schedules on those rows to be used in formulas that drive the task status and dates. We also push project status commentary from Smartsheet to matching epics in Gitlab so that PMs don't have to enter status twice.
• Batch read from Gitlab: Currently we export Gitlab data to a Google Sheet and then Data Shuttle it into Smartsheet. Which works ok but is prone to issues with multiple "hops" and getting out of sync with column names etc. Plan is to use Bridge instead to directly read the data from Gitlab and post to Smartsheet in one workflow. I'll use a "control sheet" that people can post into using a form and indicate which groups and projects they need data from Gitlab.

Hope that helps (a little). If you're trying to figure out whether you'll find Bridge useful, my best advice would be to decide how much integration you want to do. That's really what Bridge is for IMHO. You can use Bridge to do more advanced workflows in Smartsheet but it can be a little tricky, often it's easier to leverage the prebuilt addons like Data Mesh and Data Shuttle in combination with automations to achieve what you're looking for. That said, Bridge is quite powerful and can certainly take your Smartsheet setup to the next level.