Current uses of the Countdown Timer limit its usefulness to a small number. When too many items are in a list with countdown timers, the System is Overwhelmed error appears. And if the Create function is used to Create rows in an External SheetBridge collection, only half of the updates happen because their near simultaneous actions cause overwrites on the Google sheet; one Create gets clobbered before it can finish by another Create. There could be a simple to implement solution: Adalo already assigns a Countdown Timer to each item in a list. It already has a variable there to set the length of time, ie. 2 seconds. Add an incrementor to that variable: +1 second for each placement for example. That way the first countdown timer would run for 2 seconds, the second one would run for 3 seconds, etc. This would make the Actions sequential, instead of near simultaneous. It doesn’t matter how much time this takes on a larger collection. By giving the increment the right amount, Adalo could handle mass updates, even on slow hardware, just by allowing enough time between Actions.
I get around this by setting a limit on the amount of records being shown. Normally, it’s 30 and I let it run. For my records, I have a true/false added and filter records to show if “false” if they haven’t been updated. When I update the records, I also update the true/false to “true” so it doesn’t appear again in the list to be updated. Hope this helps!
Small batches work to prevent overwhelming updating of records. But I used a batch of only 8 to create records in a SheetsBridge external collection. Only 4 of the creates got through to the Google sheet. The others got overwritten before they could finish, by the simultaneous race condition of all creates being triggered at the same time. I know that the SheetsBridge is designed for 1 row at a time, and does bi-directional syncing. But if we could make timer-driven Creates sequential instead of near-simultaneous, no change to that design would be needed. Sequential actions done with incremented timers would enable Adalo to not be limited to small batches of updates. It would enable Adalo to handle unlimited syncing of data to Google Sheets - one action at a time, separated by seconds. Instead of wimpy batch processing capability Adalo could have robust capacity. Instead of having to go to Make or Zapier for interactions, it could do it with its own bridge effectively, as the bridge is currently designed. One simple change in how countdown timers get their length of time to run in a list could accomplish all of this.
I agree 100% in regards to anything external with Adalo. I’ve had issues with Make and Zapier sending emails for new orders, to the point where we abandoned the feature. Some days it would work great, but for the most part, it wasn’t reliable. Table Reservations (nightclub) were being missed, etc… I’m not a fan of using third party services in a no-code environment for this exact reason.