Beta testers wanted

[Sarah_Arminta]

YES. I would use previous and next A LOT.

[Chr1sG]

@cannibalflea

it would be great if you could easily access the previous or next quarter through formulas

I actually planned on implementing this, but unfortunately, custom integrations do not currently support one-to-one relations

However, you can add the capability yourself: create a one-to-one auto-relation as follows:

It works because date range end dates are actually stored internally as one day later than the date shown on the UI (see here for why).

[cannibalflea]

This is a really great point. I was always afraid of adding new fields to integrations (for some reason thought that wasn’t allowed).

However, I’ve hit an interesting issue. That one-to-one auto relation seems to work for some of the entities but not all of them. I don’t really see any rhyme or reason to this. So thought there might be a limit to how many entities are automatically linked?

[Chr1sG]

Can you send us details/examples of where it doesn’t work (and what your configuration settings are for the integration) and maybe we can reproduce the problem.

[Marloes]

Hi Chris,

We have a couple points of feedback.

• Will there be a way to create years upfront automatically? In our own system we have automated that every first of july a new year is being created.

• We have been testing some timezones.

  • When updating the time zone to Etc/GMT+14 we get an empty database
    

  • Bij Updating to Etc/GMT-8, where at the moment of testing it is still tuesday may 9th, today in the period database is still may 10th.
    Translation Dutch → English:
    Lokale tijd = Local time
    Huidige tijdzone verschuiving = Current time zone shift
    
    Vandaag = Today
    

• When creating the years, of the extreme weeks (first week of the first year and last week of the last year created), the Part of is dropped. We have created the years 2022 - 2024.

  • Looking at 2025-W01, I would expect Part of dec 2024 since the first day of this week is stil in dec 2024. When creating a year view containing months and weeks, you now don’t see some dates that still belong to 2024.
    
    

  • Looking at 2022-W52 it might be okee to not have a part of, but I’m wondering what will happen when we add an additional year (manually or automatically). Will this be set the right way?
    

We also have some challenges creating views in a nice way. I will upload a video to make visible to what we would like to accomplish.

Thanks for you effort!

Marloes

[Chr1sG]

@Marloes

Will there be a way to create years upfront automatically? In our own system we have automated that every first of july a new year is being created.

If you don’t set a start year, then the years to sync will be relative.
In other words, if you set number of years to sync as 2 (but leave starting year blank) it will sync 2023 and 2024 today, but on 1st Jan 2024, it should sync 2024 and 2025.
You can choose whether to delete 2023 or not.

@Marloes

We have been testing some timezones

I’ll look into this next week (out of office this week)

@Marloes

Looking at 2025-W01, I would expect Part of dec 2024

‘Part of’ is a to-one relation, so a week can only be part of one month. The week is determined to part of the month where it mostly lies.
The ‘Is in’ relation allows an entity to be linked to multiple higher-granularity entities.

[Marloes]

Hi Chris,

@Chr1sG

‘Part of’ is a to-one relation, so a week can only be part of one month. The week is determined to part of the month where it mostly lies.
The ‘Is in’ relation allows an entity to be linked to multiple higher-granularity entities.

I agree, but as you can see in the image, Part of is empty.

@Chr1sG

If you don’t set a start year, then the years to sync will be relative.

This is amazing!

[Chr1sG]

@Marloes

as you can see in the image, Part of is empty

That’s because the month it is part of (Jan 2025) is not being synced.
The sync does not change the logic for determining which month a week is part of for cases like this.

[Marloes]

Here’s the video I have recorded to walk you trough what we have accomplished so far and what challenges we are facing (and trying to solve).

The video is almost 14 minutes long, but you can increase the speed to 2x whenever you want. I talk a little slower in English so it’s still easy to follow then.

Feedback Planning

Timestamps:

• 00:17 - Why and how we still use deadline fields
• 01:40 - How we combine (and automatically sync) deadline and planning
• 03:00 - Why it might be confusing having deadline and planning in sync when type is day
• 05:40 - The 4 automation we use to make planning and deadline behave like it should. These 4 automations should all be added when we have another database we want to behave the same as the task database used as an example in this video. Please let me know if this can be simplified.
• 08:45 - Help needed to configure (filter) our Smart Folder to only show me this year and next year
• 09:36 - Why we need an all periods field in your Period database → To create the right context filter in the monthly, quarterly and yearly views/

Edit:
Let me add a little bit of context why I’m not able to configure the smart folder with years, quarters and months, cause I run over this a bit fast in the video.

• We are filtering the periods database to only show Year, Quarter and Month.
• If I use a relative in the filter (0 and 1) to show this and next year. I’m also showing the Quarters and Months with a relative 0 and 1.
• As a result, I’m missing a lot of entities. See image.
  
  
• I can’t get the filter set right to get only this and next year, but with all quarters and months in it.

Hope you guys are enjoying your getting together!

[Chr1sG]

Thanks for the feedback - will definitely take it on board.

Wrt the smart folder filter challenge, I think you would need to create a (recursive) formula, such as this:

and then use this in your smart folder filter:

(in case you’ve not done a recursive formula before, you need to know that the formula should be created and saved with the correct data type first (with dummy values) before it can reference itself)

[Chr1sG]

@Marloes

• When updating the time zone to Etc/GMT+14 we get an empty database
• Bij Updating to Etc/GMT-8, where at the moment of testing it is still tuesday may 9th, today in the period database is still may 10th.

It seems that there is a bug. The JS library that is used to calculate the names takes a timezone string, but does not offer easy way to get a list of valid timezone strings. I used a different library that supported exporting a list of timezones. Unfortunately, it seems like their lists do not match
This means that timezone strings like Etc/GMT… and Utc/GMT… do not work properly, and will function as UTC (or not at all).
Sorry.

[Chr1sG]

@Marloes

Here’s the video I have recorded to walk you trough what we have accomplished so far and what challenges we are facing (and trying to solve).

I’ve rewatched the video, and am wondering about the needs related to a deadline field specifically.
I understand that the picker for a relation field is not good when it comes to choosing a time period, but if that were addressed, I am curious to understand what you specifically need the date field for.
You mentioned automations and templating, and so I’m curious to know if there are ways that the required functionality could be achieved with the db relation…?

I’m not suggesting that it is preferable, or even very pretty, with this beta version, but I’m just keen to understand the use case(s).

[YvetteLans]

Hi Chris,

We don’t know if we understand you correctly, but will give a lot of context in the hope it answers your question

Our users need:

• Deadline via a date picker, because of UI and so they can see on which day a date is. They use the deadline when the date is fixed, for example: May 17th 2023. They need to know that this is a Wednesday and that it’s ‘the third Wednesday of the month’ → that information is provided in a date picker.
• Planning via your ‘period integration’ database. So that they can choose vague options like ‘this week/next week’ or specific months or quarters like ‘May 2023’ or ‘Q2 2023’.
• We use the date field in several automations. Usually we update the date field value based on the information in a template. For example "user decided that the deadline should be 2 days after the automation trigger date; so update date field with new date “May 19th 2023”

We can imagine that those automations/calculations are also possible with your integration; but it feels difficult. Because we normally have those date fields in the Task database (plus other database) and all automations to update that date field are there as well. So that is the specific database where we decide what the new update date field should be.

@Chr1sG

but if that were addressed, I am curious to understand what you specifically need the date field for.

If all use cases above were addressed, we only need the date field because of the date picker.

I hope this is somehow understandable for you I find it hard to explain it simply

[Chr1sG]

@YvetteLans

I hope this is somehow understandable for you

Totally understandable, thank you

[YvetteLans]

@Chr1sG

Note: this app will only function for the next couple of weeks. After that, attempts to install or sync will probably return an error. Please don’t use it for anything mission-critical. If/when we release the final version, it will not use the same url, so anything you have used this beta version for will be broken, and will need to be recreated

Hi @Chr1sG,

When do you expect the final version to be released? We would really love to integrate that one with our workspaces

[Chr1sG]

@YvetteLans

When do you expect the final version to be released?

Unfortunately, there are currently no plans yet for a formal release

We need to do some deep thinking about what is the ideal way forward (+ what resources we can throw at the problem). It could be that we go with

• a solution like this (maybe with some clever way to make date picking easier)
• a totally new field type
• changes to the existing date field type to support flexible granularity

There is no easy choice I’m afraid.

If it is interesting, we could maybe open-source the code, and allow people to create their own versions. We wouldn’t be able to provide support though, so it’s a risky option

[Matt_Blais]

@Chr1sG

We may soon release an integration template that would allow users to create a database of time periods (days, weeks, months, quarters, years) as the next step in making managing date information in Fibery more user-friendly.

How is this project coming? It looks like I will need something like this to group my voluminous data into smaller chunks for Reports.

[Chr1sG]

@Matt_Blais

How is this project coming?

Nothing to report. There may not be any progress for some time (due to competition for resources).

@Matt_Blais

It looks like I will need something like this to group my voluminous data into smaller chunks for Reports.

How do you imagine that this integration might help you with reports?

[Matt_Blais]

@Chr1sG

How do you imagine that this integration might help you with reports?

The problem is I can’t currently build periodic aggregation reports (totals for a particular week/month/quarter/year) that allow the end user to change/select the period; because I have too many records, I HAVE TO pre-filter them in the report config, which disallows the user from changing the date filter to other periods.

And anyway the report date-filtering is really clumsy for choosing periods/date ranges.

So I’d like to build some kind of summary/rollup DB that aggregates data for a particular “period of interest” (month, week, quarter, year), from a fundamental data source (e.g. all Call records related to a Salesperson or Client).

The aggregation records will be the new data source for the periodic reports, instead of the underlying fundamental data.

[Minh_Tri_Do_Hang]

I got 1 Expense Database with Payment Date field (also a lot of date field in other database wanna link to), How can I set rule to get it automatic link to the exact Date in this Datetime database ?