CHANGELOG: October 28, 2022 / Form View (experimental), View description, Hide Spaces, ClickUp sync

:ear: Form View (experimental)

Form View is here to help you get data into Fibery.

Use Forms internally to post bug reports or vacation requests in a standardized fashion, and share them externally to process feedback or job applications.

In Fibery, a Form is just a View: create it via the left menu, select a Database, and configure Fields that should appear on the Form. Here is a video that shows how to create a new Form and share it with the world.

Next: the ability to specify default Field values and support of relation Fields are coming in the upcoming releases.

Please try to create a Form and let us know if something prevents you from sharing it with the team and the world.

:thinking: View description

Tired of explaining “what this Board is about”? Now you as a Creator can a description to every View:

2022-10-27 15.57.58

Descriptions help new users to make sense of a Workspace. They also guide existing users to add new items and maintain the View properly.

The description supports rich text including links and images. Collapsing/expanding is per user.

Next: Database descriptions.

:see_no_evil: Hide Spaces in the left menu

Some of us have [way too] many Spaces in the left menu:

  1. some of them we don’t want to see at all;
  2. some of them we need once in a few weeks.

Hide rarely used Spaces from the left menu — they will appear in the Hidden Spaces section at the bottom:

Hiding, as well as reordering, is per user: if you’d like to manage the left menu for other workspace members, please let us know.

:electric_plug: ClickUp sync

Sync Tasks and Users from ClickUp into Fibery:

To be honest, we don’t expect you to use both tools simultaneously for a long time — this is more of a one-time import :smiling_imp:.

The sync includes custom fields, relations, and dependencies. All custom file Fields are synced into a single Files section in Fibery. Rich-text Fields are not formatted correctly since ClickUp API only allows to download a plain-text version.

See ClickUp integration guide for more details.

Next?: sync Documents, Task comments and attachments.

:shrimp: 3 Fixed Bugs

  • It’s possible to delete a single select option marked as default
  • OE: rich-text fields jump in height while loading
  • Esc behaviour in table view should be improved
11 Likes

Really nice update, and forms are a big new feature!

Two observations about forms:

  • Creating a form is only available from the left sidebar, clicking on the “+” sign. If I go to the database page and click on “Views” next to the database name, and then “New view”, forms aren’t listed as an option.
  • For some reason forms are only working from desktop browsers. I tried several Android browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera) and if I go to the form link it gives me a “page not found” message, then redirecting me to the sign-in page.

We will add Form View into database setup page as well.

What link you tried to open via mobile browser? We tried and it works so for us…

3 Likes

If possible, could you please share an url of that form?
We then can check it specifically, through logs as well.

Thanks! I just sent the form link via intercom.

Awesome!
View description was one of my most wanted feature when I built my views and migrated from Clickup. I also love the hiding spaces one, it cleared out my sidebar. I haven’t tested the forms yet but we’re one step closer to add the hiring part on Fibery as well.

2 Likes

I double checked and forms are working on all mobile browsers. This is fantastic!

I had saved the form link in Evernote :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth: and upon clicking on it, it was replacing ‘@’ with ‘%40’ which invalidated the link.

Apologies to the support team for flagging this silly mistake!

1 Like
  • Are Forms only for creating a new entity? They might also be useful to view/edit an existing entity.

  • Can we have a new Automation Rule trigger for when an entity has been created via a particular Form?

  • It might also be useful to be able to add query params to the Form URL to specify field values.

2 Likes

Yes, it is for new entity creation. Can you provide an example or use case where editing is useful?

In the next release we will add an option to set default values for fields in form view and hide fields from a user. So you will be able to create some field, let’s say, single select in your case, and set a value for any particular form. And you can rely on this field in automations.

4 Likes

October releases have been :fire::fire::fire:

Annotating things inside a system is so important for onboarding and your future self. Especially in a platform like Fibery, that is prone to sprawl into many databases, fields and views, if adopted well. :heart:

I have some feedback for forms! :heart:

Can we have the form field trim the (plain) text fields on submit?
I.e. want a user that copy-pastes an entry like ID abc123 to be stored in DB as abc123

It’s super duper common when users copies and pastes data from other applications, that leading or trailing whitespace is transferred, and in my experience there are never a reason to “respect” leading or trailing spaces, in simple text fields. If the form doesn’t trim it, we have to put cumbersome automations to do it.

Notion actually trims all leading and trailing whitespace in most inputs including databases on copy-paste (Fibery does not :disappointed:).

In Notion DBs, trailing and leading whitespace are stripped on paste into text fields, but user can manually enter a text field, and add (back) whitespace via keyboard, if they so wich. Spaces added this way are then retained on copy paste (I don’t know how they do it, but it’s super nice).

Personally I cannot think of any use case where I’d want to intentionally store leading or trailing spaces in a text field on manual user input. (Updates via API should naturally preserve content including whitepace.)

It would be super great with basic regex validation on (plain) text fields

One typical benefit of forms is to validate user input. With the form being connected to fibery that has typed field, this is already very good. Dates, Numeric fields, Selects, etc.

However, text fields are a bit problematic. Typical use case is we ask our user for something like a customer id or order id. But our users easily confuses the IDs, or types something else that is wrong.

Regex is very powerful here to validate text fields, and raise the data quality of data from submissions.

Therefore I’d love basic regex validation support for (plain) text field. Since regex is so powerful, we can build most of any pattern validation we want.

I don’t think we need a separate validation error display field apart from some error highlight on the offending field, since we can put the input (format) we expect into the field descriptions, which is already supported.

Add ‘submit another’ after submission

It would be great if admin could set if user should get a “Submit another response” link, that returns the visitor to the form again (blank).

Especially when a form is iframe:d, it can be hard for the user to work with the form otherwise, if they need to make multiple submissions. Even if you can refresh the page without side-effects, its not really obvious that it’s possible.

Microsofts Form has one implemtation of that. In MS Forms, it’s an option the form creator can enable per-form. I typically think its fine as a default behavior, but I can imagine some users might want to have it as an option.

Idea: can we have the option to let Creators & Admins “lock” the default view mode to preview ?
I can see the form being useful not only as a shared link outside of Fibery users, but as a simple templates for internal Fibery users. I guess this a bit analogous to the “create Issue” forms that Jira always had.

If you create an entity and it has 20 fields, it can be hard to focus on the most important fields. Once you update, you typically just work with one or a few fields, but that is not the case when you create an entity.

For example, to quickly register a add a new invoice to Fibery, I’d like to use the “Add Invoice” form inside Fibery as well. Using the form, I got nice descriptions, and I can focus on only the relevant fields thanks to the form. I have some simple validation to guide me as well.

However I do recognize this path is a little… slippery slope-ish?
Because then next, I’d want the form submission page (inside Fibery only) to give me the option to redirect to the newly created entity, or to submit another. And maybe have the have form presented as an option to use, when a user creates an new entity.

I see something more controlled, like Jira-forms, down this path (which is a good thing! but obviously requires significant effort). But I be curious to hear if you have planned something like this for later?

Other form issues

You already seems to be working on relations and putting hidden inputs, so we can properly target a form submission with a automation rule. :slight_smile:

I wonder if we will be able to filter the relations that will be selectable, since it can potentially be quite a lot that shows up (e.g. and 90% might be archived/non-relevant)?

Also templates in rich fields would help a lot to keep things dynamic and flexible, perfect for stuff like bug reports and as a template for user requests and feedback (what data we expect user to send in).
But I think you are working on a solution to make that possible as well?

3 Likes

Thank for the insightful feedback! Here are my comments.

Good idea, we will do it soon.

Also good idea, I will add it as a feature for form view, but here we will wait for more feedback before implementation.

This is in near future plans (1 month)

We have this in plans as well for near future. We want to allow admin to configure New menu in all Views and display some Form View. Thus you will be able to configure New and users will see Form View when the try to create a new entity.

Relations fields are implemented and I hope we will release them this week. Hidden fields are in progress and they will be released in 2-3 weeks.

We have this feature in backlog, I added your feedback. So far we have no immediate plans to implement it, we are collecting more cases.

This is also in progress and will be released in 2-3 weeks.

2 Likes

Yes please :+1:

It is also quite easy to create an Automation Rule that always trims blanks from any field:

1 Like

And if it’s a simple text field you can also trim spaces with formulas (without using a script)

1 Like

First, thanks @mdubakov for the replies, and sounds like good news for me.

…We want to allow admin to configure New menu in all Views and display some Form View. Thus you will be able to configure New and users will see Form View when the try to create a new entity.

That is very interesting! Looking forward to see what you do in this space. I can see it will help with data input and being able to easier implement processes and workflows.

As for my feedback on trimming data on manual text input when working inside Fibery with DBs…

(Since Fibery trimming of text inputs from forms is on roadmap, I’ll not touch that.)

@Matt_Blais and @Chr1sG: I realize there are workarounds (but thanks for pointing that out!) but to be clear, in my opinion technical workarounds like this all come with a cost. (And I know you both know that already, and are just pointing out the current possibilities!)

That cost is time and effort from the admin, the feeling of the system not working “with you”, etc.

If we are talking about trimming “any” text field, I don’t find it makes any sense to try to put formulas or automations on every database, just to get this. I want my automations only when I “really need” them (as few as possible).

I feel this thing about trimming manual text input in Fibery DB’s is a separate topic and product request (and likely more effort on Fibery team’s side than trimming text input from form submission) so I’ll create a new Idea for this, because I still want it (not urgent, but it will help keep data quality high, which is “long-term important” for me).

Hang on, I’ll link this post to my Idea, if you are interesting to continue that conversation there. :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes

Here’s my take on this idea or feature request:

1 Like

:100::100::100: (that’s 100 million percent FYI :smile:)

2 Likes

@mdubakov - Another use case for Forms: to specify parameters for a Button.

It could be useful to display some arbitrary custom fields in the form, fields not belonging to a DB, which the Button/script can use as parameters.

E.g.:

  • A text field for the user to specify some filter criteria for the operation (a search string, date, min/max value, etc.)
  • Checkboxes and custom Single/Multi-Selects, e.g. for the user to specify behavior options of the script
  • Entity-chooser field, to allow the user to specify specific entity(ies) of a specific DB