Select a random element when a button is clicked

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Hello. I’m just playing around with Grist for the first time. I want to solve a very small use case I was previously using a Google spreadsheet to do.

I have a list of rows, each with two simple string fields (Album and Artist) and I want to select a random one on demand. I’m not sure how to achieve this.

I tried:

  • Add a column with a random value (=RAND()), sort by it, grab the top one. Problem: the random column doesn’t get updated, not even on document reload.
  • Add a view that selects a random field (using Python random.choice on the list of elements) and then shows it. Same problem: it never gets updated after the first (presumably random) choice.

So basically what I’m missing is a way to trigger that random recalculation.

Any pointers on where to look?

Thanks in advance!

2

I don’t have a custom solution, but I am aware of this custom widget (docs in French) that does random draws based on a number of pulls or a percentage. I played around with it and it works, though there were a few quirks. Might be worth a look!

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3

If your formula uses time, even if it just throws the time away (e.g. by reading NOW()) then it would update once an hour. If your formula refers to say a cell in a dummy table, like a Version table with a column of the same name, then every time you change the version number all cells referring to it would be recalculated and you’d get fresh random numbers.

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