Google Integration - Reliability Issues

We have been using Jotform for a year. What drew us to it is the Google integration. It's a great tool. Thank you. I need your help though. 

The fact that the integration can stop at any time makes the system untrustworthy. Since we started using Jotform, I have had to explain to each sub-user that the integration might stop working and to be on the look-out. Once we realize that something is not working, we re-integrate. But that's not a good system. 

Ideally, the integration would not stop at all. If this cannot be achieved, can there be a mechanism that flags when the integration stopped working? 

We are embarking on a new venture where Jotform and the Google Integration would play an integral part.  

What causes the integration gaps? What remedies are there? How have other companies dealt with this problem? 

Please advise. This is urgent.

Angela Androla

 

I understand that you are having some frustration due to experiencing occasional issues with our google integration that stops working on your form(s).

Were you making any edits to your form or spreadsheet during the time you had these problems?

In most cases this problem usually doesn't happen unless you've changed something on your form or the spreadsheet during the time with which you had the integration active on your form.

This is because making modifications to your form or the spreadsheet in the slightest bit can cause it to go out of sync.

And in other occurrences this can some times rarely happen if the oAuth (Google's Authentification System) gets updated which can break the integration unfortunately if not kept updated on our end but this is usually not an issue since our devs do what they can to keep it consistently up-to-date.

New response received
Kade,
Thank you for your quick response. Based on this here is what I understand:
- Everytime we make a change to an existing form, we should redo
the integration
- If we make changes to the Google sheet, this might affect the
integration also, i. e. we should reintegrate.
We will do this and see whether this alleviates the problem. Obviously,
there is nothing we can do about the oAuth system updates?
***

Angela
...

Here are some information from our developers.

They said that the spreadsheet stops updating if the refresh token is revoked by Google. Sometimes a new row is also not inserted if Google returns a server error. Unfortunately, these things happen but our developers are doing their best to improve this integration.

Now editing the form does not literally break the integration. Let's say you added a new text box field, when you submit the form, the Google Spreadsheet updates itself with the new field you have added.

How about when you delete a field? Now when you delete a field, the spreadsheet does NOT delete the column associated with the deleted form field. It remains there with the previously added data. You can still receive submissions in your spreadsheet.

The data on your spreadsheet depends on the column header, if you changed the column header title then that column will stop receiving the data. Let's say you have your form field label "E-mail", it shows in the spreadsheet's column header as "E-mail", if you changed the column header title to "Electronic Mail", then that part of the spreadsheet will stop receiving the data. If you revert the change, let's say you edit it again and added "E-mail", when a new submission arrives the spreadsheet refreshes again and will update the said column because it now has the correct column header/title.

How about when you delete a column in your spreadsheet? Then the submission data won't go through your spreadsheet because the columns are now broken.

How about when you changed the sheet name? Then the submission data will also not go through your spreadsheet because it is not properly integrated to JotForm.

 

We do not recommend doing extensive changes on the spreadsheet as it may cause data to out of sync as mentioned by my colleague. If so, then re-integration will be needed to make sure that all of the data on your form will be added in the spreadsheet.

What I can recommend is using that as a lookup sheet and reference it on a new spreadsheet where you can make edits or changes. Google has the function IMPORTRANGE that does this, you can check this guide: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093340?hl=en. 

 

For the other question that you have, I have opened a separate thread for it so that we can discuss better. Please refer to this link instead: https://www.jotform.com/answers/833434. We will address it shortly.