Cross Entity "Tags" via using Single Select and keeping names identical?

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1

Hi guys,

If you have a chance, I’d love to get your feedback here:

I was trying to categorize Types within in App. Ideally, I would like to do this with “tags,” but they don’t exist yet as such. I believe you have talked about an extension for tags.

So what I did as an experiment was I created a single-select in both of the Types in question, that I want to have in the same “category” of Type. My example is I have two types of Vendors, “Suppliers” and “Growth Vendors”. In order to try to group these two Types, I named the single-select field exactly the same in each type, you can see highlighted in yellow in these two images below:

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I have also highlighted in the 2nd image in blue the different names of these types so you can see they are different.

Then, I named the actual single-select the same, “vendor,” highlighted in pink.

I then created a board within the App, chose the two types, and sure enough I was offered as a column type just one single-select option, although this is in fact two separate Types in question.

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Then, when I created the board, I was able to see both types with the same “option” from the single-select, “vendor:”

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So by naming both the single-select field the same, and the “option” in the single-select dropdown the same, even though these are two different Types, I create a view where I can see these together as if they are grouped with a typical “tag” or “label”! This is fantastic as I did not expect Fibery to be able to recognize the common data across two Types.

What’s more, in this de facto “category” of “vendor” from the single-select column in the board, I could create an entity of either type!

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This means I can quickly add into my makeshift category an entity and it will automatically pick up that value from the single-select, terrific!

So by using the identical wording in the single-select, it appears the boards will look at the single-select field and if they are they have the same wording, treat them as common to the types in question - brilliant!

I would be curious if this is some sort of hidden functionality that you guys could elaborate on - perhaps there are some other uses?

Thanks guys!

2

For what it’s worth, this functionality seems to be present for several field types: single select, multi select, workflow state, assignment assignees, relationships
It is a lovely capability, and I already have several use cases, the obvious being a big board that shows the workflow state of every entity, or a big board showing everything according to who is assigned.

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Chris, yes that’s exactly right it’s a very nice feature I think the team could highlight more in marketing when the time comes, because other apps don’t do this. Goes to show the underlying architecture in Fibery is well built. One issue I have with the other three “biggies” of Airtable/Coda/Notion is there is no way remotely to do any Polymorphic linking from “anything” to “anything”. All these apps limit you to relate from one table - a “Type” here in Fibery - and another.

But here in Fibery we can already relate anything to anything with Highlights. And if we get Polymorphic:

We’ll get more capability here. I really think you’d have a host of users of those apps looking at Fibery as from my experience, it seems like a real limitation that hinders a lot of users in those tools.