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CRON / SCHEDULE / REPEAT / REFRESH #1401

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gustavopch opened this issue Jan 25, 2025 · 1 comment
Open

CRON / SCHEDULE / REPEAT / REFRESH #1401

gustavopch opened this issue Jan 25, 2025 · 1 comment

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@gustavopch
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gustavopch commented Jan 25, 2025

Describe the problem to be solved

I want to schedule/repeat the execution of a formula over time. In general, Grist seems much more feature-complete than Rows at this moment, but they have this feature and it's super useful.

This pairs nicely with their HTTP request functions so that, for example, you can write a formula that will run an HTTP request every minute/hour/day/etc. to sync data or perform repeating tasks.

I know it's possible to do this via the API, but doing directly in the spreadsheet is so convenient.

Describe the solution you would like

In Rows, they have 3 functions, each with a slightly different behavior, but maybe you can consolidate into 2 functions or even just 1.

Also, please enable the REQUEST function on the SaaS version. These 2 features (making HTTP requests + scheduling/repeating actions) would instantly enable so many use cases! I'm considering migrating from Rows to Grist, but the lack of these features will probably be a blocker.

@dsagal
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dsagal commented Feb 5, 2025

Thanks for the feature request. I think you are right to note that its usefulness is mainly for external integrations, such as the REQUEST function. In fact, the (disabled) REQUEST function is the only connection Grist formulas have to the outside world. So making REQUEST (or other connections) work properly would be a prerequisite to scheduling being useful.

As for REQUEST, it's disabled for two reasons:

  1. Because of the focus on data privacy and control. Today Grist formulas run in a restricted sandbox, and only have access to the data in your document. E.g. they can't extract your data and send it somewhere else. The REQUEST function would change that, so we'd need some mechanisms to give the user visibility and control.
  2. Grist lacks feature to turn the results of a request -- which often (usually?) include multiple records or values -- into anything other than a blob in one cell. I see that Rows has features to extract the result into a table, and to create a table that remains "connected" in some way to the original request, and to extract particular fields of the data into other cells. This is the harder part of the project to enable REQUEST -- something like this needs to be worked out, designed, and built for REQUEST to be useful, but we haven't had the bandwidth to do that.

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