Failing to write to a specific cell in a Google Sheets data source

Hi team, as per the subject, I have a small project I am working on for myself as a learning exercise (it’s a personal recipes database, and am trying to set it up to find any matches on rows that match a certain string - ie. looking for an ingredient, etc). In the project, I have a Google Sheets data source with 3 tabs - one with the source data, one that will be used purely for filtering the data, and the 3rd for doing the actual filtering.

The issue I have is that, for some reason, I’ve been unable to get my app to update cell A2 in the filtering tab. It simply does nothing.

This is the cell I am trying to update, on the “Filter” tab (potentially expanding this out, but for now, I am concatenating all the source fields in order to simplify doing a fuzzy search/filter for partial matches - I just need to be able to update this particular cell with the search string the user has entered, in order to facilitate the filtering):
Cell

The tabs I have in my sheet:
Tabs

This is how I have the block set up to do it (the logic I’ve used for this, is that once they’ve typed a few characters, it’s enough to start filtering on, at which point I want it to update cell A2… which the filtering in the View_Table tab is set up to atuomatically filter the data on. I’ve tried both 1 and 2 for the index, just to see if I could get it to work, but it just does nothing):

I’ve been looking over a number of different topics on this, tried Google, CoPilot, etc… and so far am drawing a blank as to why this is refusing to write… the data connection is fine, as I am able to pull data from the main table without issue - I can also pull it from the View_Table without issue.

Suggestions/comments/questions very welcome :slight_smile:

I did just notice when I referred back to this thread that I was using as a reference when I went for the specific row #, rather than trying to find an ID… and I noticed that I had a standard text value in there rather than an actual value block.

However, I’ve updated it, and it’s still not writing:

This works for me so I think there may be a problem with your Google Sheet not being synced in Thunkable. This can happen if you change the name of a column header or add/remove columns. And no, it doesn’t matter if the row id is a text string or numeric value.

Can you update the value in that cell when the Screen Opens (without any conditions), just as a test?

Thanks for the confirmation that it SHOULD work! That’s always a good start knowing that you’re at least on the right track lol. I had a look, tried simply writing a fixed value, which didn’t work.

So then I added a create row call on a different table, just to test it out - and THAT didn’t write, either… (and yes, I’ve done a sync of the DB - I did that yesterday also, but forgot to mention it)

Wondering if I may need to disconnect/reconnect the data source just to re-establish write permissions (I’m still able to read data without issue)?

Oh!! I just found the answer, I think. Got a good hit on the “related topics” at the bottom this time around. No idea why it didn’t show this one up earlier lol.

From Writting to Google Sheets seems to be unreliable

Worked around it this way - check to see if there’s an entry in the table… if there is, update it. If there isn’t, create it:

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