Formula Debugger

[Aaron_Owen]

I’ve been slowly adding more advanced formulas to my base and I’m starting to create formulas that have errors in them that I cannot find easily. I’m also a pretty heavy user of Cognito Forms and I really like the way they handle formulas with errors:

The simple debugger lets me know the general vicinity of the error which allows me to understand what I may have done wrong. Usually the issue is a simple syntax issue, but with larger formulas with nested if statements which often contain additional functions, tracking down issues can be somewhat problematic. A little help in this area via a built-in tool would be much appreciated.

[Dean_Toland]

I think this is a great idea, and I’d similarly like to see the more complex formulas marked up with color coding to show what sections are related to data. When you start nesting IF statements and the like, the parentheses and quotes get out of control, and it’d be really helpful to see which series of code pertains to each other by linking them via color coding so it stands out and you can quickly see if you’re writing it wrong when too many elements link together and they shouldn’t.

Hopefully that made sense.

[Aaron_Owen]

Nested IFs in AirTable are a huge pain. I end up writing the formula in Sublime text, but lose the ability to reference exact field names and syntax hints. Improvements to the formula writing portion of AirTable would be super appreciated. Syntax highlighting would be sweet, some sort of debugger, and maybe an expanded view to be able to see long calculations in a nicely formatted way rather than just a text jumble would be great. Here’s an example of a status field that is a bunch of nested IFs which wasn’t very much fun to get working:

[Robert_Laing]

Totally agree. I end up having to try to write these things out in a text editor.

I think as a really simple MVP for this it doesn’t even need to be inserted into the product (if that’s difficult).
It could just be a separate page where you could auto-format your formula with indentation & highlighting.

[Chester_McLaugh]

At the very least, don’t automatically add parentheses or remove spaces/line breaks.

That way whatever formula I create (as long as it’s valid) would be left the way it was when I copied it out of my text editor and pasted it into the formula box.