# Convert & Delete/Replace Entity preserving references

**URL:** https://community.fibery.io/t/convert-delete-replace-entity-preserving-references/2530
**Category:** Ideas & Features
**Tags:** rich-text, search
**Created:** [February 11, 2022, 5:00am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/convert-delete-replace-entity-preserving-references/2530 "2022-02-11T05:00:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![B\_Sp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e8c25b/32.png) [@B\_Sp](https://community.fibery.io/u/B_Sp)
#### Post date: [February 24, 2025, 6:46am UTC](https://community.fibery.io/t/convert-delete-replace-entity-preserving-references/2530/5 "2025-02-24T06:46:12Z")

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I would like to add a hearty vote for this feature as well. I also took the liberty to edit the title of this with the addition of “preserve references” hopefully that is OK @cannibalflea

My team has been in Fibery a while, since late 2019, and we have a lot of db hierarchy structures that are evolving, and could use some edit. This could be solved by [Polymorphic Relations](https://community.fibery.io/t/polymorphic-relations-when-creating-relation-ability-to-have-many-types-from-which-to-choose-and-not-just-one-type/425) but I know that is some time away. We track a lot of static things, like products, service providers, equipment, etc. and some of the structures of these things need edit after 4 + years - we need another level in our hierarchy for equipment, a sub-product is now a product, or vice versa, etc. This ideally would lead to moving these older entities, with tons of references and history, into new structures. In more free-form tools like Notion or Tana I can just move those out and basically “retag” them into new DB’s with no issue. The entity stays the same and I don’t need to “convert” it to a new Type. There might be some issues with field mapping but there are simple ways those tools solve that.

However right now in Fibery the conversion feature only maintains comments as far as I can tell. **very importantly all references will be lost**. This means we are sitting with a lot of key entities that are core to our business - like products, etc., that are stuck in the wrong structure and we can’t move them at the risk of losing years of history.

I also wanted to repost here some other suggestions I had for more involved process in converting entities. Again I think with the degree of inflexibility within Fibery because entities are stuck in DB’s, which I would call the more “atomic” level in Fibery, vs. say another tool like Notion where the entity is the more atomic level, and DB’s are formed more loosely to essentially group entities, but the entity (or page, issue, node etc. - however the other apps refer to them) are the core base-level piece of data.

> [@\[APPROVED\] Replace All References (or convert to type?)](https://community.fibery.io/t/approved-replace-all-references-or-convert-to-type/982/8):
>
> I agree with this and you are talking about some more advanced ways to relate two Entities that I would really advocate for. There are numerous discussions in the community around aspects of this, sorry I don’t have time to find the references, but off the top of my head:
> 
> - Converting an Entity into an Entity within another Type, with full mapping options, and other options like “maintain references” and “copy comments” and other advanced copying
> - Linking An entity to a newly created entity that would copy over much of the original entity’s data, but be in another Type
> - Your request to merge two related entities into one
> - Full tracking of the history trail of the connection being made between the two Entities: in the new one, info that it originated with the previous one; auto-write to comments about the “conversion” from the originating entity, etc.
> 
> I would have great use of this, and I advocate for dev time to be spend to build out sophisticated capability within Fibery to move Entities in various ways between Types, and to merge them if need be. I think this is going to be essential down the road due to the flexibility of Fibery and constant need to tweak set-ups and teams’ needs evolve.

Thanks!

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