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Question on Items

  • June 28, 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 278 views
dlazar
  • dlazar
  • Participating Frequently

I am new to Monday.

I have a Board. I want to add an item. The GUI for the App shows three interesting things about an item

An item has a name, a week, a quantity and an order number. So I would see columns like that.

“foomanchu”, “June 27”, 3, “#327656”

So now I use GraphQL Mutation to insert a new item in the board. Thing is, I cannot wrap my head around Monday in terms of item column values. I do a GET on an existing item, and I see what I consider to be unstructured data.

Specially, for an item named “foomanchu”, these column values.

{“value”=>“"JUN 27"”, “text”=>“JUN 27”},
{“value”=>“"1"”, “text”=>“1”},
{“value”=>“"30204"”, “text”=>“30204”},

So there is no reference to week, quantity or order #. So if I want to POST a Mutation with a new item for this board, and I have the board ID and the name of the item, what are the column values I present, so that they fall into the Week, Quantity and Order Number columns all other items are created with?

It like this add new item to a board mutation expects column values but they actually come with no such description as week, quantity or order number, just a value and type “text”.

What is the secret sauce here I am missing?

TL:DR; Monday seems be totally unstructured, yet has structure. How do you insert with structure?

4 replies

Matias.Monday
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  • Matias.Monday
  • monday.com Team Member
  • July 3, 2023

Hello @dlazar and welcome to the community!

I hope you like it here 💪

What do you mean when you say “An item has a name, a week, a quantity and an order number”?

You mean you have an item in your board with a week column, a numbers column and a text column, and you want to create an item with these columns populated with values?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,
Matias

dlazar
  • dlazar
  • Author
  • Participating Frequently
  • July 3, 2023

The view presented via the Monday baord, shows columns with headings like Week, Quantity and Order Number. I get it that I can create a new item with text, numbers etc, the different “types”. But what confused me was having to assign a value, say a quantity, to a column known as Quantity!

So inspecting an already created item, showed that as “numbers7”. OK. so that is my goto key, but that was only discovered via my manual introspection.

In other words, when working with Monday, and inserting new data so it appears in the right columns, I have to do this?

ChrisBuna
  • ChrisBuna
  • Participating Frequently
  • July 3, 2023

Where/how are you adding items via the API?

Have you looked at this for documentation: Items

specifically the column values section: column_values: "{"date":"2023-05-25"}
is an object or column ids and their value. Be sure to look here: Column types reference so you pick the right value structure.

If this does not help, post your function you are trying to us so we can give suggestions on some edits.

dlazar
  • dlazar
  • Author
  • Participating Frequently
  • July 3, 2023

Have I looked at the documentation? Yes. It is limited, but fine for all intents.

Yes, I understand the concept. Monday is an AdHoc throw things at it, and it works.

My problem was getting over that hump. I use API calls to add new items 0, 1, 2 or N times per day. While each item is independent, each exhibits the same attributes. So a number column labelled as Quantity has to always show up in the board holding the item in the Quantity column.

There is nothing obvious about how to do that in the documentation. I had download with a GET and existing item, see that the Quantity was always stored in “numbers7” as an ID, and then use that when POST’ing new items.

That is not how I usually work, usually an item would have an attribute with a set key of “quantity”, and perhaps a type of “numeric”, whereas with Monday, it is more free-style, and you have to go with whatever you find… or so it seems to me.

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