These are essentially the same thing… no? But are currently entirely unrelated. I found this something I was struggling with when building. Do I make it as context views or relation views?
I have no idea how it would be linked to each other or even if its a good idea. Just noticed they are very similar in nature and that makes it a bit confusing. I don’t want to rebuild the same thing twice. or show the same info in two places.
Curious: How do others use them together? Do you build out both or hide the relation fields within the entity?
A context view in a smart folder can be mirrored or not. In the former case, then yes, it behaves a lot like a relation view.
A non-mirrored smart folder context view is an entity-specific view, whereas mirrored views and relation views are database-specific.
Typically, relation views are used to simply show the linked entities for the field they belong to (although see this) whereas smart folder context views might be more appropriate for complex views which involve multiple types.
Smart folders and their views are also useful as left menu navigation points, and can be turned into smart sections, which allows you to better achieve a ‘matrix’ organisation of data, e.g. spaces can represent departments (sort of grouping by roles) and smart sections can represent projects (cross-functional information).