Saved screens and moving code around?

Questions about Thunkable
1

Hi all,

I’ve got an FLL team (5th and 6th graders) working on building their first app. I’m about this far >< ahead of them, so please bear with me if this is a silly question.

I’d like to have different kids working on different parts of the app. They need to program several screens. “OK, cool!” I thought. We can save screens and then make a new app by adding those saved screens.

I’m having two problems:

  1. Saving a screen that uses either a built-in data source or a Google Sheet data source doesn’t seem to work. The data source doesn’t save with the screen. So when we add the screen to another project, the data source isn’t there, and we’ve got a bunch of number placeholders for where the data source name and columns should be.
  2. Sharing a project with someone else doesn’t retain the data source (either type) either. While we can add it back, then we have to change a LOT of blocks that get reset when the data source changes. [I could work around this by having the kids work in the same account, but it would seem to make any shared project with a datasource not very functional.]

Help? Is there a way to combine screens that have data sources?

2

Hi @catsarisky, welcome to Thunkable!

Thunkable isn’t really built for multi-user development of apps. So the problems you’re running into are problems that are because of that lack of support.

I think you’re going to have this issue with any sort of cloud based data source that gets synced to Thunkable. The one exception to this is Firebase because you can use cloud variables to generate path names to data. So it would be pretty straightforward to have multiple projects pointing to the same Firebase data and then save/restore screens as needed.

I can’t say I’ve tried this… only that I think it will work.

I’m currently having students work on individual apps but would love to be able to have them do group work!

3

Thanks tatiang. I agree that there’s not really support for my issue #2, but #1? That’s saving and loading a screen as the same user. Shouldn’t that work? Can someone else confirm that it doesn’t? (We’re new, so it could be an /us/ problem.)