Current limitations to more powerful entity hierarchy

Pretty new to fibery, but while trying to setup nested tasks, I’ve kept on hitting walls after walls

  • While it’s possible to nest entities in a view, this is only possible if they are the highest element. Click up nests tasks perfectly fine in a kanban view, which is impossible (without some serious trickery) to do in fibery

  • The one solution I have found is to group in columns based on the “root” task status, and then sort based on name concatenation. This is very cool, but there’s no indention, and it breaks drag and drop.

  • Adding arbitrary “group by” hierarchies would fix all this, I’m sure there’s an issue already.

  • Speaking of accessing root tasks, this is possible using recursion. But fibery clearly doesn’t want me to use recursion, because not only it requires to create a dummy function to create it before you can self-reference, but the auto-complete hides the self reference.

  • It’s also impossible to access “[This Type]” outside of a filter function. So simply trying to make a field return “root or self” is impossible without using automation to create a self-reference field too.

  • Designing entities requires a lot of trial and error, but having to delete and recreate fields every time you want to change the type is difficult. Having a conversion tool based on formulas would help a lot.

  • Similarly, having a formula based conversion table to convert from a database to another would be sweet

  • Finally, it’s a bit of a crazy requeat, but having “setter” formulas to complete “getter” formulas would allow to use existing drag-and-drag features with any fields, which would be, like, super cool.

(Finally I’ve found multiple people mention a “color feature”, but I can’t figure where it is documentated. I just want to give icons and colora to my tasks :c )

Fibery is a marvelous and flexible tool, but it is quite strict about how DB’s can be structured/related. To make good use of it, one must understand its limits, e.g.:

  • No concept of Type hierarchy/inheritance/composition, or joins
  • All relations between DBs must be explicit, via Relation or Lookup fields
  • Lookup fields (which reference a field from a related entity) are read-only

I assume these limitations are necessary to guarantee good performance from the underlying implementation.

Hi, I am not fully get the problem. Can we start from a use case? What you want to achieve? Maybe there is some solution we can recommend.

Pretty simple, recreate a clickup/Trello type kanban with nested tasks. How do I display nested tasks sorted by current status?

Do you have a screenshot from Trello or Clickup?

Most of the elements I’m suggesting are simply extensions of what fibery already does, but allowing them to mirror elements from other tools such as notion and clickup.

Fibery’s Board/kanban view does not show hierarchical/nested relationships.

I understand. This is the purpose of this feature request, I’ve listed a few blocking elements that prevent me from creating my own nested kanban view on fibery

Of course! Please ignore the content of the tasks though

Got it, I think it is more like hierarchical list grouped by state on top. So far Fibery can’t group lists by state, but we are working on new tables/lists feature and I hope we will support it there.

There are no workarounds that will help you to get exactly the same list so far. You can see nested tasks, but not grouped by state unfortunately.

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I’ve managed to group them through sorting by “path”, and using the root task for grouping. But it’s not perfect

Similar effect in notion

We are also facing limitations with the current hierarchy options for nested relations.

In ClickUp the hierarchy of subtasks was perfect. Both in list as in board view.

In board view you can click on a task to open the subtasks on a board.
image

For each and every subtask you can directly set fields like priority, deadline, state, assignee etc. which is really helpful. You’ll see the state and you can choose to not show closed subtasks.

ClickUp also provides the option to always show all subtasks as separate in a board view (if you don’t want them to be nested)

In a list view ClickUp is also very UI friendly for subtasks.

We also had a smart folder like view. With all projects and their tasks and subtasks. That’s currently not possible in Fibery (if you have a task-task relation for subtask) which makes it hard to plan all projects.

But we are now rebuilding a part of the workspace and place subtasks in a seperate database so that we can recreate that view in Fibery.

Overall ClickUp sucks, but they did a really good job at notifications, comments, separate private space, recurring tasks and subtasks.

That’s makes it hard for us to migrate the solution 1-1 that we’ve built in ClickUp to Fibery. On the other side: because of Fibery’s really great core we’ve build a workspace that’s 5x better than the one we’ve built in ClickUp. So Fibery still wins big time.

Would be really awesome if Fibery can also master the stuff that ClickUp was really good in :smiley:

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Some improvements were added in the last release