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March 2025 Mobile Qrew Meet Up Recap
Hi Mobile Qrew! Thank you to all who were able to attend Wednesday’s Mobile Qrew Meet Up. Here’s what we discussed: Jenny Gomez, Technical Support Engineer, started off the meeting with a deep dive into data tables including what is it, how it’s different from lookup tables, advantages, and limitations. FastField's data tables provide a more dynamic and efficient solution compared to lookup lists, with real-time updates, individual row modifications, and integration with external data sources like Google Sheets and QuickBase. Next, she shared four different ways you can use data tables in FastField. Data tables can be created from scratch, from an Excel/CSV file, or by connecting to a Google Sheet or QuickBase table. The process involves configuring columns, setting up keys, and naming the table, and more. During our meeting, we spent a lot of time discussing various formulas, settings, and potential solutions to consider when connecting, syncing, and reporting on connected data tables from the field. This meeting is one of my favorite Mobile Qrew Meet Ups we’ve hosted because Jenny shared many important details that harmoniously merge the Quickbase and FastField experience. I highly recommend watching the recording in full and be sure to join the FastField Office hours hosted on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to ask follow up questions. Here is the link to the recording: https://quickbase.zoom.us/rec/share/NAKgrKNsiKPOXHgYbCzvkVcRxXocxtJdm1jxUFjfogpLBy25hVSzAVPLm16kxSMQ.ToAF2qQXa32Z0gYJ?startTime=1742399719000 Resource files from Jenny: https://mergemobile.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/27657201966733-Data-Tables https://mergemobile.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4446538238093-List-Filtering-By-Another-List https://mergemobile.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/34933397969037-Data-Tables-Filtering-by-Quickbase-Records In lieu of our normal bi-monthly Mobile Qrew Meet Up, our next meeting in May will be a webinar: “AI capabilities in Quickbase and FastField” on Thursday May 22 nd . We are still working to get the event registration page set up but will have it available on the events page in April to register.3Views0likes0CommentsQuickbase AI Beta Tools Now Available - Contest!
https://helpv2.quickbase.com/hc/en-us/articles/31162224971284-About-Quickbase-AI Check out this new Quickbase Help Article that showcases new AI Features for our builders. I'm going out on a limb to try something new and see if I could get some responses by running a fun little contest. Please respond to the following questions below: If you have tried the new Beta AI features, what is your first impression of it? What AI features mentioned in the article will be useful to you? What features mentioned in the article would you like to see additional updates to that will make even more useful to you? Do you like trying out new Beta features or do you wait until they are officially released to the general audience (GA)? Any other comments to share? Folks who can respond to all 6 questions on this thread are eligible to be part of a contest where the most helpful response(s) will receive a $25 discount code to the Quickbase Swag Store.10Views0likes0CommentsNew update on Automations and and more as well as improvements to Pipelines
Update on the Retirement of Automations, Actions, and Webhooks features | Qrew Discussions Have you read the most recent update from our Product Marketing team? Click above to check out the latest update on Automations, Actions, Webhooks, and more by Brian Cafferelli that was posted two days ago. I wanted to highlight this for the Pipelines Qrew so everyone is aware of these upcoming changes, and start a discussion with the group for those with questions and feedback for the Community team to listen. What do you think of this latest update? Will it impact your current workflow? Do you need converting some items into Pipelines? If so, which ones? Let us know your thoughts below.March 2025 Pipelines Qrew Meet Up Recap & What to look forward to in April
Hello Pipelines Qrew, Thank you to all who were able to attend the Pipelines Qrew Meet Up on Wednesday. Here’s what we discussed: James Malone and Matthew Tillinghast from Juiced Technologies shared a pipeline solution that entailed creating a master app that consolidates all the timecard records, allowing for better data management and reporting for their customer. James went through details of the pipeline process, including handling record creation, updates, and deletions. He discussed the challenges they faced, such as dealing with unique field constraints, mapping field names across different applications, as well a certain error message. James used placeholder parameters in the pipeline call definitions to easily accommodate new data requirements from different source apps and found callable pipelines to be very helpful in making this solution scalable across the 25 source apps. We had lots of comments and great questions that were addressed in the meeting. Missed the meeting? Here’s the link to the recording. Our next Pipelines Qrew Meet Up will be on Wednesday April 16 th at 12pm EST. The agenda is nearly finalized. I’m hoping the Pipelines product team will be available to answer questions about new features that will officially go live at Empower and include a customer use case from our friends from Accenture. Thank you and have a great weekend! Best regards,14Views1like0CommentsMarch 2025 Qrew Meet Up Recap and What's in Store for April
Hello App Builders Qrew! Thank you all who were able to attend yesterday’s App Builder Qrew Meet Up. Here’s what we discussed: Maria Peralta, Community Content Manager, walked through the online Community site including how to create profiles, access resources, and engage with the discussion forums. She emphasized the value of the community for users to ask questions, share knowledge, and provide feedback to improve the platform. We are looking to make the discussion site a place to source topics for upcoming Qrew Meet Ups, speakers, and more. If you haven't already made a profile or checked out the community page, we highly recommend login and explore the site. We also addressed current user experiences faced by users of the site and are working on solutions to improving the search functionality and more. If you have any feedback about using the Qrew community site, let us know. We are here to listen! Missed the meeting? Here’s the recording to listen to. Our next App Builders Qrew Meet Up is on Tuesday April 15 th at 12pm EST. 2024’s Qrew Legend Mark Shnier will be sharing an address-to-address use case solution that he answered on a community discussion page. It’s a great opportunity to meet Mark and to see the solution live in action. Thank you and have a great afternoon!6Views1like0CommentsHappy Women's History Month!
From the Women's Leadership Group here at Quickbase to all of our rockstar female builders and developers, Happy Women's History Month :) Thank you for all of the hard work that you do both on and off the field, for being apart of this growing community, and for being the best Quickbase fan-women you can be! I'd like to take a moment and reflect on what it means to be a woman in tech these days. According to Women in Tech, at the end of 2023, women held approximately 35% of tech jobs in the U.S., this number decreasing to the mid- to low-twenties when it came to leadership positions, dropping to 8-9% of women in C-Suite positions in tech. Representation has improved drastically over the last 40 years, but the tech space certainly has a ways to go. With all the awesomeness of Empower at the end of the month as well as it being a lot folks' end of Q1, we will not be meeting this month, but keep your eyes peeled for updates on cadence come April. In the meantime, let's use this thread as an opportunity to celebrate one another - if you know of badass female builder, give her her flowers on this discussion thread!11Views0likes0CommentsMarch Realm Admin Qrew Meet Up Recap and April's Agenda
Hello Realm Admin Qrew, Thank you to all who were able to attend the Realm Admin Qrew Meet Up on Tuessday March 4 th . Here’s what we discussed: Mihir Molloth from the City of Philadelphia presented their governance strategy for managing Quickbase applications across different city departments as they faced challenges with legacy workflows, data silos, and knowledge loss when employees left the organization. The governance application tracks all Quickbase apps, allows reporting to leadership, and ensures responsible use of the Quickbase license. The governance app has three components: an intake form via Formstack, an intake management app, and a feedback/enhancement request system for app owners. To dig into the app, check out the Formstack intake form, and learn from words of wisdom from Mihir, check out the recording here. Some quick announcements! Don’t forget to vote for the finalists for the Qrew Legend award. Voting is open until March 14 th . Vote here. On the fence about attending Empower? We are sweetening the deal by offering a $200 discount code: QBMardigras Our next Realm Admin meeting will be on Tuesday April 8 th at 12pm EST. Andy Krumrai from Rockwell Automations will be sharing their governance strategy when using the Quickbase Sandbox for managing and updating applications. He’s got great tips to share so you don’t’ want to miss it. Thank you all and have a great afternoon.4Views0likes0CommentsFebruary PDX Qrew Meeting Notes
Diego Alvarez, Tammy King, Pat Wenger, Pierce Wagner, Nico Cantillo, Lee Gilmore, Jonathan Miller, Elena Larabee Intros Diego Alvarez was the first to present a problem. He is working on a formula to compare date values between a set of fields. The difference between dates determines a duration between start and finish and is displayed as a number of days. The collaboration energy was strong with this one as we all discussed and postulated the best solution. Tammi really took the lead with assistance from Pat, Lee and Elena. In a few minutes we had a working formula and we were ready to move on to the next problem. Pat and team Harder have been working on understanding best practices and methods of improving Dashboard report loading performance. We have many Dashboards containing gauge reports that are struggling to load. Some reports we call My Reports, filter by the current user. My reports allow each user a custom experience. Quickbase tells us the username lookup is likely the cause of the problem with slow load times. As a group at Harder we have discussed this many times but are still unclear on the logic behind the recommendations of using the email address over the QB Username. Quickbase recommends using the email address with a ToUser() formula versus using the QB Username. At the Qrew meetup, no one had a solid explanation and we weren't certain how to explain why one works better than the other (this is going to be my Elephants Child at Empower this year). One response from Lee was to use a User table, which is pretty much what we have with our Employees table. We use both User type fields and an Employees table in various locations throughout the realm. The easiest way to set up a nice gauge report is to use the User field, employing an Employee table is more complex and takes longer. Another solution is to use a Formula check box to identify where a User field in the record is assigned to the current user. In this case we use the formula UserToEmail(User()) to inform a check box. Then in the My reports filter we look for is equal to in place of is current user. The same filter is applied to the Gauge report as well. The explanation is that the formula does all the work once, whereas the is current user performs the same work for each report. I would really like to see a visual representation of how this works. Next Jonathan was asking for Kennedy. Kennedy wants to know how to transfer a pipeline from one account to another. There are many variables involved in answering this question. But here is a tldr general answer below and we can work on this at the next PDX Qrew meetup. If the email address is owned by your company, then to transfer Pipelines over to another account, as a Realm Admin, change that email to a service account. If the email is not on your domain, log on to that Users pipelines and transfer them manually. Below is how to transfer manually in several steps. First export the YAML. Next setup a service account. Last replace the slugs and import the YAML to the service account. The goal is to replace this part of the YAML called a slug: iAmasLuG and then import the modified YAML to the desired account, preferably a service account. # Account slugs: # - quickbase[iAmAsLuG]: Click "Profile and preferences" located in the upper right corner of the dark grey App bar Select Impersonate a user and enter the user to impersonate (the transferring away from account) One at a time, click the pipeline to export Click the kabab icon Click export Click "Download all YAML" or select all the text inside the black background in the Export Pipeline window and save it to a text file Once all the YAML is downloaded, open the YAML in VS Code or Notepad++ Find the all the slugs in the text and replace with the one from the service account What service account? Read on. Create an alias User: Have IT add a publicly accessible email address to your domain as an alias forwarding to one or more Users who will access the Pipelines Verify the email can receive email from outside the domain by sending an email to the address from gmail or some other email service. If you get a bounce email, tell IT to make it public Add the email as a User to Quickbase On the Users page of the admin console, locate the email Under authentication select Use Quick Base to manage password ~ wait for the email The registration email is sent to the alias email and then forwarded to you Click the register link and fill out the form with information. Record the information in a secure location like Roboforms so others can access this information in case you win the lottery Make the alias email into a service account: Admin console > Permissions, add the User to Permitted Users and groups with Build Pipelines and Create user tokens toggled on Admin console > Users, search for the Alias User, click on the User so the sidebar pops out In the sidebar scroll down and toggle on "Use as a service account", add whoever needs access to the service account Refresh the page and look at Profile and preferences dark grey upper right, there should be a Switch Accounts section and the alias is listed in that section. At this point you have all the Pipelines YAML now you need a slug. Get a service account slug: On your account click Profile and preferences, click switch to service account Once connected as the service account, click Profile and preferences again Click Channel accounts On the channel accounts page copy the Account slug to Quickbase connector Open each of the Pipelines and find and replace the old slug with the service account slug On the service account import the modified slug YAML files Test the import Turn off the old Pipelines Turn on the new Pipelines Switch back to your account Easy right? To be fair, once the process is understood, it is really easy to perform and can be done in a few hours depending on the number of pipelines to move. Also this process is only going to happen once because from this point forward everyone is using the service account and no one is adding Pipelines on their account. @Kennedy, join us for the next Qrew meetup and we can walk through the process. Next Elena shared some interesting methods around using the Quickbase Document Generation (doc gen) "Document templates" tool. She talked about solving the problem of combining individual PDFs into one pdf output (we call it bundling at HMC). The process is done using the Document Generator Restful API. A JavaScript code page is written where one generates PDFs on multiple child records via URL parameters. Then sends the separate PDFs to a PDF microservice like Convert API. Convert API loops through the PDFs and combines them into a single document. The final document is put back in a record in the App as an attachment. For Elena's solution the use of Chat GPT helped complete the JavaScript process. Elena is using PDF Lib to perform the bundling. The only caveat to this solution is file size. If the combined file size is greater than the allowed file size (50MB last check), this method does not work. Informing the User who clicked the button of the error is the next problem looking for a solution. In regards to security and uploading business files to microservices, it is not certain who has access to the files uploaded, further investigation is recommended. Nico also has customers who are using the Document Template feature in Quickbase. He mentions the cell height is limited to 50px statically and cannot be changed (without effort). He was unable to explain why 50px is the defined setting and was equally confused. Maybe someone at Quickbase can explain the 50px baseline and why this value was not given to the builder to decide. Finally we discussed a Pipeline question relating to whether it is better to batch update or loop update records on a scheduled pipeline. For this problem I have a garbage collection process where I want to schedule the clearing of values entered in different fields after a condition is met. In this case, we have employee records where one or more Employee's are Onboarding and upcoming dates are filled out prior to Onboarding date as a mean to prepare. The Pipeline looks for records two weeks after the onboarding date and clears the date fields. In my experience with Integration Reads, it is more efficient to batch update over loop update. I started a Pipeline using Resful API to get a report. Once I had the report I wanted to parse the JSON in the report to prepare a csv for upsert with blank values. The entire group suggested this method was easily done with a formula field and a search and loop update records Pipeline. I still would like to see if it is possible to get a report, make some changes and then batch upsert at some point in playing with Pipelines. Overall the meeting went really well and it feels like we solved some problems. Afterwards we decided to visit Eem and continued our conversation around Quickbase life the Universe and everything.March 2025 Qrew Meetup Event
Portland Qrew is meeting the forth Wednesday at 3PM PST at Harder Mechanical Contractors and also on Teams. We'll talk about Empower a little and maybe make some plans for the event. Then we will talk about current projects, new changes and challenges. Sometimes we show off our work and cheer each other on to higher heights. We ask attendees to bring problems to solve and then work together to provide a solution. Anyone willing to share is welcome to have a problem solved by a team of very nice people who all love helping. Afterwards I suspect we will go out somewhere and welcome recommendations. If you would like to join remotely email jharrison@harder.com directly and he will send you a Teams invitation.