Problem this solves:

Building a Glide app with a contact list that includes a WhatsApp link on each contact's profile.

This is not specific to Glide, but can be used for any app that relies on a Google sheet for it's backend data source. Below is an example of the output.

IMG_415B6F8AD62A-1.jpeg

Step 1: How to create a WhatsApp link

Every WhatsApp number has a URL. And the URL is actually relatively simple to create. the URL begins with "https://wa.me/" followed by the full international phone number with area code. e.g. "+15551234123" for USA or Canada, or "+495551234123" for Germany

So to create the WhatsApp link all we need from the user is their complete phone number. We will capture the user's phone number in our sheet and then use the CONCAT function to combine it with the static part of the URL that we already know.

Note: For our case we need to use CONCAT instead of CONCATENATE. I'll explain later.

=CONCAT("[<https://wa.me/>](<https://wa.me/>)",B2)

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Step 2: Dynamically creating new WhatsApp links as new data comes in

So once we know the components of the WhatsApp link, we will need this new cell to dynamically fill whenever a new row is added. Sure, we could just copy and paste the formula down throughout our table, but that would not only cause a bit of a mess for the app, but it also means we need to manually update it if our user list gets longer than the number of cells we've pasted to.

For this we will use the ARRAYFORMULA

Tangent: How does ARRAYFORMULA work

ARRAYFORMULA is an interesting tool that allows you to enter a formula once and have it auto populate throughout an entire array.

A great use case of this is if you have a table of user data with, for example, private data in cells A through C and the data that you actually want publicly available in the app in cells D through G. You can create another tab for the public data, and simply use the ARRAYFORMULA in the first cell and have it

Super basic example in this screenshot is me duplicating everything that is in Columns A through B into column L through M

=ARRAYFORMULA(A:B)