I have a table with some data that I then send to a service to generate a PDF and attach it to the row.
So, when some of the data is changed I want to immediately delete the attachment (as it is now outdated).
The intuitive thing to do has been to add a trigger formula on the PDF column with None as its body, and trigger it for the columns I care about.
UI does work, the attachment is gone but… is it? on “Raw Data” the “Size of Attachments” is not going down!!
Unused attachments don’t get cleaned out immediately because it’s somewhat of an expensive operation to figure out which are unused. That’s because the same attachment could be referenced from different cells (and even in different attachment columns or different tables). They do get scanned and cleaned out periodically – about once an hour – so Raw Data should reflect the reduced size after a little while.
Can I ask which service you used to generate PDFs from Grist data? I feel this wish comes up fairly often, so I’m interested in recommendations!
Thank you for the quick reply. That does make sense!
I just created this post explaining my solution using one of your templates. Hope that’s useful to others