February 20, 2025 / 👮 Required Fields, Comments on Whiteboards, Asana integration, some permissions improvements

[RonMakesSystems]

I’m very grateful for the required fields. But are one-to-one required field on the roadmap?

[Mircea_Braescu]

Hmm.
Having used the required fields, I think there is room for improvement on how it works.

I also don’t agree with this quote from the docs

Remember, it is not possible to have an entity without a value if a field is required. This means Fibery will always asks a user to fill this value for new entities. It makes new entities creation harder, but it is what you wanted!

What I assume people wanted, or at least what I want, is to make entities creation harder WHEN AND ONLY WHEN the required field would not be automagically filled out.

Let’s me illustrate the point with a specific example:

In our setup we have a PROJECT database and a TASK one.
Every TASK must belong to a PROJECT, which means the project field is required.

However, we also use Smart Folders per project, meaning that as long as a person creates a task from within the Smart Folder, the project will always be automatically set.

That means that 95 % of the time, Fibery just works, and we can easily create tasks from Tables or other views without needing to go through an intermediate “create entity modal” step.

However, due to Fibery’s versatility there are situations when a person might create, without them realizing, a task entity outside of the Projects smart folder, meaning that the Project field would not be automatically set.

It’s then and only then, in those 5% of the cases, when Fibery should say “here’s this Create Task modal so you don’t forget to add the Project as well”.

[RonMakesSystems]

I think a part this announcement is missing is that marking relations as required also prevents them from being deleted. Thats absolutely amazing in terms of making sure data is coherent. There was only option to cascade deletion, but not prevent deletion. Bu here we are!!! Thank you to the Fibery team. I would say “prevent deletion” is a whole feature in and of itself. So two birds with on stone on this one.

One more thing though! I think it there should be a toggle for “prevent deletion” or “cascade deletion”. What if I actually do want to delete a project with all of its tasks. Now I need to first delete all the tasks, and only can I delete the project. (Not the end of the world, but not ideal)

And with that, I think Mircea also raises an really excellent point. Required fields are more about database integrity than they are about UI. Making it always to much harder to create (things like a task in a project) will stray people away from required fields (when they should actually be required). When its linked in relation view, it doesn’t even let you change it, yet it still pops up.

[mdubakov]

@Mircea_Braescu

It’s then and only then, in those 5% of the cases, when Fibery should say “here’s this Create Task modal so you don’t forget to add the Project as well”.

Yes, you are right. We are going to have a better UI for required fields in the next iterations and this case will be fixed

[ccollins]

This is such a great update. Y’all are truly amazing.

I started playing with required fields and have a few notes about the modal popup:

• If name is a formula, it clearly says that at the top of the popup, but still has an input for you to type in a name (even though this won’t keep after creation)
• In the field selector, required fields can’t be dragged to a different order. So the only way to get an order you want is to create a form, but even here the field selector for required fields is unavailable, you have to instead drag from the form page.
• Despite field order, rich-text stays at the top. I would like to be able to have the various fields at the top and rich-text at the bottom.
• If you have a many-many relation (not required) and create an entity from a view specific to that relation, it is autofilled but won’t let you select more options
  • For example: people >< touchpoints. If I create a touchpoint on a person’s page, it autofills that person, but won’t let me select more people even though it’s a many-many relation.

I would also love the option for a modal popup even if no fields are required!

[mdubakov]

@ccollins

I started playing with required fields and have a few notes about the modal popup:

Modal popup is a temporary solution till we handle UI more gracefully in different places. Formula Name will be handled in future releases.

The last point looks like a bug, we will check