Breadcrumb on Entity card to show location in Hierarchy

Hi Guys,

I think it would be great if you could add in the top of a card some “breadcrumb” style information to show those that are in a Many-to-one Hierarchy arrangement, to show the user at a glance where this Entity is located. This is a feature of many other apps that use a top-down hierarchy set up like Wrike, ClickUp, etc.

Here is an example. In the Software Dev App, I have “Bug” at the bottom of a three-level hierarchy:

Release → Sprint → Bug

On the card of a “Bug,” this is an example of how that hierarchy could display:

Also it’s worth pointing out that now, if you want to see that location at a glance, you have to “burn” a field on a lookup. Since Fields can proliferate, it would be great to get the information without needing to use another field.

Thanks for the consideration and eager to hear if any thoughts from the Fibery Product Team on this!

I think the idea is nice and simple, but in practice not achievable. It works well if your entity relations are nicely hierarchical, but what if they’re more complex? What is the breadcrumb trail for an entity that has more than one relationship of the one-to-many type. E.g in your example, what if you had a Team entity type that also pointed to Sprint, what should the breadcrumb trail look like for Bug?
Release -> Sprint -> Bug or Team -> Sprint -> Bug?
And as the relations get more complicated, it can become almost impossible to resolve, e.g. with circular type references (meaning an infinite breadcrumb trail)

Chris, thanks! Yes you are right in that regard, depending on how you represent the hierarchies between various entities around Fibery.

My thought is that this would be only on the level of the App. My impression from using Fibery for about 10 months, the community here and convos with the Produce Team, is that the App is where the Entity “lives,” if you were to “assign” in a sense its default location. So I would suggest the Breadcrumb only reflect an App’s hierarchy, not outside. The thing is without this, my team gets constantly confused as to “where they are” in Fibery as the Entity Card, as is, seems to have the entity just sort of “sitting in space” with no context of where it is, other than the relations on the card itself.

I am very eager to see what @mdubakov & co do with Hierarchies. They talked about it a bit on the Blog, Twitter, etc. some time ago, but I haven’t seen much mention in recent posts, including this week’s July chronicles. Did you use TargetProcess? I would love to see some stuff come over re: hierarchies as that was one of the best implementations I’ve ever seen!

Good to hear from you, thanks for the commentary!

I wasn’t actually meaning that the breadcrumbs ought to show hierarchies that come from outside the app, I was just meaning that there are occasions where the relationships even within the app can be multi-hierarchical and/or circular.
Take for example the fibery template for usability:
image
What should the breadcrumbs say for the Attempt entity?
Test → Participant → Attempt or Test → Task → Attempt ?
I actually have apps that are more complicated than this, and I know would not be able to have breadcrumbs shown in a meaningful way.
Perhaps the breadcrumbs implementation is wrong, perhaps the card needs to show a mini diagram of the app relationship diagram, with the entity type emphasised in some way (e.g. by ‘dimming’ the other ones):

@Chr1sG ah yes, good point! I was initially thinking of a lot of the basic Templates and simpler Apps that would have a straight hierarchy. I too have quite a few complex apps with relations in all directions!

Good thinking with some other solution then. The bottom line is that I think it would be very useful if we could see the “location” within the App more easily. Maybe some kind of indicator where you are within the App in the context of other Types? Another thing that I keep seeing in my team is a desire to quickly reference a “list” of the Type, without having to make sure a view was built.

Great discussion and I hope this kicks off some start of building this ability within Fibery soon!

I totally agree on the need for a jump-list of all entities of a given type.

The alternative is having the entities as always listed in the App, which means that they take up a lot of space, or having to create a table view just for this purpose.

Perhaps a right click on the App name/icon could show the diagram of all app types (inc their relations) and then a click on the name of a specific type brings up a lift of all entities of that type.
Or if you already have an entity open, clicking on the name of the type (in the header ribbon) brings up a list of all entities of the same type.

Is that the kind of thing that would suit you @B_Sp?

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Thanks @Chr1sG! Yes that type of solution would surely be helpful, too. Bottom line is to get some visibility into the location of the entity for context. This would help for sure.

I continue to have this need working in Fibery - to be able to quickly get to a list of the requisite “Type” of the entity in question. Hate to say it, but this is a stalwart feature of Notion and one I miss. In Notion, when I’m in a Page that’s in a db, I can easily get back to the entire DB and see a list of the Entities in one click. In Fibery, right now, depending on if I’ve clicked around to something that was in a reference or otherwise navigated to it, it can be very time-consuming to find the list of Type in question, here are a few scenarios:

  • The left menu has a lot of Entities that have turned on “show this type in left menu” in the App setting. So you can get lost easily as this can mean that you can only see one App at a time if a whole hierarchy of Types is unfurled

  • You are liberally referencing across Fibery (great feature I have to add) and you wind up clicking into a reference that is from a Type that is a completely different place, and may or may not have easy access in the left menu. For example, I don’t need all the default tables for Types that Fibery does, so I delete them at times, but then it can be hard to remember for me, the admin, and let along the users in my team, to find the one view that has a full list of the entities.

My main point with all this is that I am getting resistance from my team that is used to being able to easily click over to a “Type”'s list in most all other apps we have used.

Thanks guys!

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