If I copy a to-one relationship in a table and paste it, Fibery doesn’t actually copy the specific entity, instead it looks up the name and pastes the first entity from that database with that same name. What it pastes isn’t even restricted by the established relationship filters.
There are of course instances where you need a database to always have a unique name, in those instances this “copy” method wouldn’t be a problem. BUT there are legitimate instances where you don’t want unique names.
This is a huge hygiene issue in my opinion. I just realized this bug and now have to go through everyone in my company’s projects to figure out how much of our data is linked incorrectly.
Update for anyone else that is having trouble with this - the new validation rules can be implemented to prevent this. It prevents the hygiene issue, but also showcases the heart of the issue, there is no quick way to edit relations for multiple entities without unique names.
None of the normal methods work when you don’t have unique names. Copy and paste returns the wrong entity. And neither multi-select group editing nor buttons can use relation filters, which might be fine if you could show other fields on the selection list, but instead you have to choose between two seemingly identical entities.
Would love an update from the Fibery team on if this is on the Roadmap. To me, data hygiene is a top priority. Validation rules help, but don’t solve the root cause.
Imagine I have a db of Tasks, with a to-one relation to the Project db.
Assume I have the following Projects: Alpha, Beta, Delta
If I open a view of Tasks, which shows the Project column and paste from one set of rows to another, the linked Project will be the first one found:
This is unrelated to whether or not Project names are unique.
If there were two Project Alpha’s then it would link to the first one it found.
Are you saying that you want to create new Project entities, rather than linking to existing ones?
Or are you saying that you want to somehow influence which entity it picks when pasting?
Somehow you interpreted the issue I’m trying to describe as the solution. What you are describing is the exact problem.
This is the problem. If I copy Project Alpha (with UUID #abc) and Fibery pastes “Project Alpha” (with UUID #xyz), then Fibery did the wrong thing, I didn’t copy UUID #xyz, but it still got pasted.
It seems crazy to me to define this issue in this way. Of course the user wants the specific entity that they selected and clicked copy on. Why would I ever want Fibery to search for “the first one” and paste that one instead of the one I already pointed to and clicked copy on? If I wanted “the first one” then I would have copied “the first one”.
This is why I’m describing this as a critical data hygiene issue. In no other software do I question if the thing I’m copying is the same thing as I’m pasting. And because they don’t have unique names, it is not obvious that Fibery pasted the wrong entity unless you double check it and open up the pasted entity.
Just a quick comment to add that I suspect that the current behaviour is derived from the fact that it’s possible to paste a text string (e.g. from notepad) in order to link to an entity just as well as direct copy-pasting from within Fibery, and I guess the devs took that use case and figured the best it could do is look for the first match.
But I get that this behaviour is weird when pasting an actual entity.
