My app calls an external collection based on the Google Places API response. One of the response fields is places.id, which I wish to save into an internal Adalo collection for further use. This ID is a text string, such as “ChIJ17ADm8EvdTERDFVV0GEasMQ”. It is listed in the collection fields as shown in the images.
However, when I use Magic Text to insert this value into the internal Adalo collection, Magic Text mistakenly recognizes this string as a number and converts it into a numerical value, which is not useful.
Has anyone encountered this issue or have any suggestions on how to ensure that the ID remains a text string when saving it to the internal collection?
In the test setup result, what did you got for the id’s?
If you add that ID from magic text what you get for record? Not sure if this is the normal behavior. Maybe @Victor can add some info here? Also you can Submit a Support Ticket.
Thank you for your response! In my initial message, the example of the places.id field (“ChIJ17ADm8EvdTERDFVV0GEasMQ”) is the test result from the Google Places API, and it is in text format.
I have already submitted a ticket regarding this issue. The Adalo support team suggested: “The ID mentioned in Magic Text is the inbuilt ID that is created by Adalo. Please rename your ID column for it to surface differently as intended.” However, I couldn’t fully agree with this suggestion.
The first thing I did when I encountered the issue was to create an additional identifier “Google ID” in my internal collection with a Text property and map places.id from the external ‘Repair Centers Nearby’ collection to this field. As I mentioned in my response to the support team, Magic Text still displayed a number instead of the expected text. The issue isn’t with the identifier in the internal collection but with how Magic Text interprets data from external collections. There is no intermediary between the response from the Google Places API (specifically the places.id field) and Magic Text, so I suggest that the data changes its property within Magic Text.
I would appreciate it if you could further research this issue considering this point as well.
To work around this issue, I revised my initial approach. Initially, I intended to implement a two-step data retrieval process from the external collections.
First, I planned to fetch a minimal dataset, including places.id, to populate a list in the app. The second step would involve fetching detailed information for a specific list item upon selection (click action).
However, due to the issue with places.id, I had to retrieve the full details for each list item in a single request. This approach is suboptimal as it results in increased data transfer.
Additionally, I am unable to utilize the places.id in other functionalities as originally intended.
