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AdamMorris's avatar
AdamMorris
Qrew Trainee
6 years ago

I created an App, can I transfer it into an existing app to use it?

I have a production app that I did not want to mess with while creating two other tables. At the time I did not realize there wasn't a straight forward way to get those two tables with all fields and relationships in tact to the production app. As a development process, it's not really advisable to develop something in a production app. Can I get these two tables from a seperate app into my production app now that I'm finished?

10 Replies

  • The good news is that its easy to make a copy of a table and copy it to another App.  When you are on the table home page for the test app on one of your new tables, use the "More ..." button to copy the table and it will guide you through to selecting the destination app.

    The bad news is that if there are any Relationships, they will be lost on the Copy. 

    Hence for the most part I would say that 95% of all Quick Base development work is done in a live app "carefully".  Often some of the work may be first developed and then tested in a test app and the re-done in the live app.

    The last 5% might be done using a tool called "The Sandbox", but that tool is only available in the higher level plans and has limitations such that it is not that widely used as far as I know.

    Quick Base may have plans to improve this in the future but I have not seen any public product development road maps for that at this time.
  • Wow, this is just terrible. The entire premise of the app I built is on the relationships. This blows.
  • Hi Adam,

    For the relationships you are looking to maintain are those relationships just between the two tables that are being moved or would it also be relationships to other tables either in your test app or other applications via a cross app relationship?
  • Hi Adam,

    I will admit it has been a bit since I've done this myself but it is possible to move over two related tables and maintain their relationship using an option under App Management labeled "Move a table into this app". What that does is allow you to pull in a table from another app, when you do so you are given a warning that any relationships might be broken by moving and they will until you move in both the child and parent table in the relationship, then the relationship knits back together. I recommend moving the parent and then the child table. The one side effect to this is since the parent comes over first any report link fields break but they can be recreated by editing the field properties and just reselecting the reference field in the child table to line them back up and get those reports to populate again once they are both moved over. Your existing reference fields and summary fields do come over. Then you would update your existing roles to decide what their permissions would be on these new tables (by default they are none). 

    There is one thing that can throw off this setup though, if the tables you are bringing in are the same name and set up as as any tables in your existing app the child might relate to the original table over the table you brought in. For examples if both of my apps have the exact same Projects and Tasks table becauseI used an app from the Exchange for both and then I move them over my new Tasks table might grab onto my old Tasks table, but that is an odd outlier that requires such a set up. I hope this information is helpful. 
  • I appreciate the suggestion, unfortunately it did not work properly. I got "most" everything over but the most important thing the relationship to the parent table cannot be found. I am guessing it's looking for the unique ID of the table instead of the table name and maybe that unique ID changed when the move happened. Regardless, I would like to think that the "developers" of quickbase would have thought to implement a "development" process ability to configure tables and apps outside of a production app in a sandbox environment, then have the ability to easily implement that app or table set into a production app. 

    I'm going to play with it more but I'm not very confident it's going to work. At this point I could have just recreated the app altogether. Regardless it's a lot of wasted time.
  • I just figured out what the issue was. The relationship was looking for a DBID Alias which can be found at the bottom of the settings for a table then Advanced Settings. 

    Table alias _DBID_ROLL_UPS

    I had changed the names of both tables so when I moved the tables into the new app, it changed the alias of the tables to the new name. I went back to the development app, changed the tables names back and then followed your process and it looks like it's working. I need to give it a good look to make sure everything works since there are a ton of calculations but I think that may have worked. Thanks for the suggestion.
  • Ahhh I hadn't thought of changing those DBID Alias, the fine details like that can cause some hiccups when doing processes like moving a table. I am glad to hear you were able to recover that though by updating the Alias.


  • Thanks for writing this thread i'll be going through this soon! Hopefully I'll save a lot of time thanks guys!
  • Hi All, 

    I know this won't help with this case but thought to share that we are currently working on new application lifecycle management capabilities that will let you create a safe environment for making changes and testing. Think about this as a new sandbox but one that supports all actions supported in your live app. This new solution will capture change-sets (versions) as well as give you the ability to revert if/when necessary. You should see Early Access announcement in a couple of months. 

    Again, know that this is not going to help with this today, but thought will be useful info. Cheers!