I want to be clear that for me the goal if this feature request is specifically just to better represent integration data that is “conversational” in nature. There are many such examples, Discourse, Integromat, and now Hubspot at the least. The way these are currently represented is just as big Rich Text fields, that seem to be updated every time a discussion is added to in the host/originating app. This is an effective but fairly clunky approach IMO.
I would really like to see individual messages/replies to e.g. forum topics represented in Fibery. This could be done now by simply making a “Message” Type with a Relation to Topics, and add each new Message as a relation to a given Topic, going into a Collection on that Topic. But this is both clunky and, I think, a bit of overkill (arguably). Critically it would require you to open each Reply Entity individually just to read through the discussion.
So what I am requesting above is a new type of Extension/data model in Fibery that is able to represent “conversations” in some more functional way. The way the References Extension works already is actually a pretty good model. It includes Text Content, and it shows the Author (person who linked), which maps well to the needs of e.g. a Reply on a Topic or an Integromat chat message. So the Conversations view could work similarly, but allow full content, e.g. images, etc. as well as Link to Entity and other functions. But not editing, for example (which is one of the issues with the current way e.g. Discourse topics are represented as Rich Text).
The reason I am clarifying this is:
- The subsequent discussion above included a lot of speculative possible additional functions, many of which would be great, but seem far more difficult to achieve
- @mdubakov renamed this Topic recently, and added “email integration”, which to my mind may be separate, unless that just means that incoming email is represented in this “Conversation View Extension” I have described
- I am concerned that if the scope/ambition of the feature request(s) contemplated in this topic becomes too great, people will be unwilling to vote for it, or misunderstand and overlook it, or it will simply be deprioritized by Fibery team because it requires a lot of work
I don’t want this to be seen as a major endeavor because I don’t think it has to be one. It is doing specifically and only the following, to my mind:
- Take existing data already represented in Fibery through integrations
- Look at existing “References” Extension design
- Adapt #2 to better represent #1 (obviously I don’t mean to literally re-use the References system since it works differently, I just mean it’s a design model)
- Ideally, re-index/reimport/reformat all already-imported data in integrations to use this new system, but without losing existing e.g. entity links
Other things such as Bi-directional integrations/sync, replying from within Fibery, etc. would certainly build on or otherwise interact with and extend this. But I think it’s valuable to have this fairly simple (seeming!) idea as its own feature request, because I believe it could be implemented much faster than full bi-directional sync and other things discussed in this topic, and would help a lot in making imported integration data more clear and actionable.