Entity Templates - some ideas

Hey guys,

Sorry if this is overkill and you are not eager for another comparison to Notion! But I am really finding the need for a certain format of an Entity I use again and again, so wanted to keep some suggestions active for Templates of entities.

I really like the way Notion handles this issue of adding a new entity, which in their case can be a row in a Database, from a Template:

There is a button offering pre-made Templates from that type of entity already. I think it would be great to get something like this in Fibery.

Thanks!

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Hi,
We currently use Automation Rules within TP to populate a new feature based on standard terms within the entity name. The trigger could easily be changed to read the value in a custom field and make decisions based on it.
This functionality should be able to be used in Fibery when automation rules are implemented.
We create a lot of standard developments for maintenance controllers, which follow the same format.
If we create a new feature with maintenance controller in the name it will add :

  • 13 individually formatted user stories

  • 4 test plans that contain 36 individually formatted test cases spread across the 4 plans

Hey @Adrian_Crawley really appreciate hearing from you!

I am excited generally about the connection between @mdubakov background with TP, obviously, and Fibery. My team builds and maintains websites, we have been between 3 and 12 developers the last few years, just a few right now but we are going to be ramping up and I am intending to bring the dev into Fibery! I looked at TP extensively and I am very impressed. We used Jira for a long time, this past summer transitioned to Clubhouse, far superior in my mind, but also very limited in that they have a very set way of approaching things, it’s not really a flexible tool in spite of what you might hear from the Clubhouse team. I was hoping to use TP for my dev needs and other team management needs, but I couldn’t adopt it for the non-dev stuff quite like I was hoping, so I moved away from it. I actually found out about Fibery from this great article:

https://hackernoon.com/the-next-wave-of-work-management-software-81f392c728e3

I have confidence - and I hope I’m right! - that the Fibery team will bring in, ultimately, all this great stuff in TP, such as Test Case Management, which really impressed me as I didn’t see that anywhere natively in other dev management apps. And also a ton of the good user functionality like I expressed here from the no code group, so something like the ability to use a Template easily like Notion offers (from my screenshot).

I appreciate this insight on how some of this was done with Automations. I hope this is a sneak peak into what’s in store for Fibery. I also hope some of the “simpler” functionality I outlined also comes down the pipeline soon!

Cheers!

Hi,
We’ve been using TP for over 6 years and one thing I can say is that I have no doubt that @mdubakov and the team will deliver a fantastic product with Fibery.
The lack of a test case management module and the automation are the biggest barriers to us adopting Fibery as our daily driver. The simplicity of the system will allow us to build a clone of our TP environment very easily.

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Hey @Adrian_Crawley thanks for the response and great to get a reassurance of what I was already convinced of that this team knows what they are doing!

Thanks again and eager to hear about your experience once Automations come out and you move your team over. I am just about there with my team - which is only around 9 right now - and the more we dig in, the more I am impressed!

Take care.

Hi again,

This is yet another need I have had since starting with Fibery, a basic functionality that also I cannot ascertain where it is on the roadmap - I hope somewhere!

I was encouraged by the comments of @Adrian_Crawley below, but as with some other posts I’m trying to get some response to, what we’re discussing here is getting stale I hate to say it. In addition to no word on Templates, I can’t really recall now when the last encouraging mention of another absolutely key feature, Automations, has happened. Adrian gave me hope for it here!:

I want to add that satisfying this request:

Would also partially solve the need, as you’d have yet another way to configure Entities automatically. Not really a template, but saves you from having to go manually add the Multi-Select Values you’d like.

And it’s worth noting that Notion has no default values in any of its Property Fields

Thanks and hoping at some point to get Templates in Fibery!

Hi,
It’s a weird coincidence that you mention test case management today because I emailed the team to ask if QA functionality would be included in the Product workspace being released.
The lack of QA functionality is preventing us from migrating to Fibery.

Keep the faith.

Adrian

+1 for test case management. It’s something that can’t really be achieved, even with all the customisation currently possible.
For my use case, it’s not quite synonymous with templates, but clearly shares some underlying concepts.

Good to get some support here as well as from @Chr1sG.

One thing that would keep my faith more is if we actually got some responses to these posts! I’m not sure what is going on, but I haven’t seen much at all to mine in quite a while, after getting encouraged during my beginnings in Fibery with typically getting some sort of at least token response to a good deal of the suggestions. That gave me faith!

I read avidly the blog and Twitter, and much of what I’m asking about lately is not at all mentioned. This mostly has to do with the basic stuff you’d expect to see in Work Management software, such as Templates! Would much rather see this released than say Trello Functionality, which Chris observed, and I seconded, seems like something that is not needed because you can use Fibery for the same:

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To be fair to the fibery team, Michael has indicated that the trello integration is/was not a big piece of work, and perhaps if it is enough to win over some otherwise reluctant trello fans, then it might make business sense.

I’ve had a go at cobbling something together. It’s not pretty, but it’s a start:

Just to keep providing some examples of how this could work, Notion Templates are very useful for a ton of stuff I do in Fibery. What’s more, In Fibery you can use Highlights to link to other Entities, which in some cases allows for lessening of “Proliferation of Fields” which the Notion templates can’t solve.

Here is a great Meeting Note one from Notion:

In Fibery, if I could just start a Meeting with a Template like that in a click of a button, I then have a leg up on Notion with being able to write the notes with #references and all of those get the notes transcluded for all intents and purposes, terrific!

But what I’m missing now is the actual Template. Without this, I have to take a prior Meeting, Paste the content, but delete the actual content I wrote under the Template Headings, and start afresh.

So I feel like the big piece of Highlights is good to go in Fibery, but we are missing the “little” piece of being able to access Entity Templates. No other tool has Highlights, a real feat by the Fibery team. But just about any other tool I’ve looked at has Templates.

The only workaround I can think of is to have a dummy “empty” Meeting Entity that I would duplicate with a button everytime I want to start a Meeting. But that brings up the point of where does this entity live? I’d prefer it doesn’t take up one of my ID’s in the Meeting Type, and this just doesn’t seem like a clean approach.

This is just one example of how Templates would help. Really hope to see this feature soon!

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I want templates too, so I don’t suggest this as a replacement really, but one thing I’ve considered is having a meeting Type, which it seems like you already have. And then just doing multiple Rich Text Fields for the different parts of the meeting notes, which you have there as headers. They could instead just be several RTF arranged on the Type layout. I realize this may be non-ideal for other reasons though, and you’ve almost certainly thought about it already!

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I see a couple of options:

Define a flag of some sort to distinguish between an entity that is an ‘empty’ template and those entities that you really want to see, and then filter out the entities for each of your views, based on the flag.

Create a type which is solely used for the ‘template’ entity and use a button to duplicate it as the ‘correct’ type. Assuming that the ‘template’ type and the ‘correct’ type have the same fields etc. it would be pretty easy to do with an action button.

Sorry to resurrect this topic but I think templates are really important and hopefully will be on the horizon soon. I had the same needs as @B_Sp in terms of meeting notes, in particular for recurring one-on-ones, wanting to start with something like this:
image
I actually see two options for this:

Option 1: define a template for rich text field as the default value:

Option 2: provide the ability to define multiple templates for each rich text field and then allow user to choose a template when creating a new entity by selecting between blank or one of the templates:

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I forgot to mention that I would also love to see proper templates for generating PDFs (related to this request).

In a recent tweet, PDF generation was demoed:

However, the template style and language didn’t seem too sophisticated and it seemed you had very limited options in terms of layout. I was hoping for something that would allow for custom HTML and CSS coupled with a decent templating engine to allow for more sophisticated formatting (if desired) (see this).

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Thanks for the support! I think you shouldn’t apologize as this is a big need and not really being addressed in the community, although I did see it flash in the twitter WIP (I think…). Would be great though if the team updated actual requests in the community to sync with the WIP’s being published in Twitter. Otherwise we users have to take our own time to do that…

You can solve this problem using Actions now. It is possible to create an action that will fill rich edit field with markdown template when clicked.

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Michael, could you let us know if you guys plan a simple Template set up where I could pre-determine a template within a Type, then with a simple “+” generate a new Entity off that? This could be done out of the “ctrl” + “K” command as well if such templates were available there.

One example is my team has a Meeting Type (I just discussed this in another context here). I have different types of meetings that are determined by a single-select dropdown tag in that Type: Quarterly Review, Sprint Planning, etc.

Right now in Fibery, if I want to see all the meetings of a certain type, I have to create a view and filter on that drop down. However, if somebody creates a new Meeting in the Type, and does not remember to manually use the drop-down to select the meeting type, the filter will become inaccurate and this is problematic. Being able to tell somebody on the team that “just use this template to create your Sprint Review,” and knowing that using this template will automatically get the drop-down included, will avoid this issue.

Many other tools I’ve used have a very basic feature like this and it’s very useful to be able to create an Entity “pre-filled” at the click of a button.

@cannibalflea curious about if you’d have use for this, and eager to find out what the Fibery team plans around this basic need.

Thanks!

There is a decent workaround for that already. You may setup several Action Buttons to fill many fields with a single click. For example, for Sprint Review you can add this button:

And when you click it it will fill two fields

2021-07-08 10.20.17

You may ask your teammembers to add a meeting and then invoke relevant action to prefill it.

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