FRQ: Reports to Allow Basic ETL on Ingest

Ideas & Features Integrations
1

Hello!

As I’ve been working on using Fibery for some reporting, I wanted to share some feature requests I’d love to have, as I believe they would increase the power of Fibery for reporting exponentially for (presumably) little cost.

For context, I had built complex reporting systems on Domo and the other standard tools. I am NOT expecting Fibery to compete with these, but I’d love to have some concepts in Fibery as it will make our reporting by factors easier and better.
We use Fibery as our FIRST reporting tool to prototype and solidify how we want to look at our data before building tailored integrations and custom dashboards. Meaning we export data from other systems into Google Sheets or API endpoints and then ingest in Fibery.

And yes, this is outside the recent Fibery focus areas, but I hope all see the value of this.

  1. Transform on Ingest: I would love to be able to transform the ingested data. Specifically, I’d like to change field names, define their type (can be done already), reformat data with regex (e.g. strange date formats), add mapping from one value to another (e.g. phone country code to country code) or filter values. I understand that building a UI for this is a lot of work. For the foreseeable future, I would be super happy to be able to configure this via a mapping document defined in XML or JSON. The result would be a tight and neat data table.
  2. Link to Fibery Data: Alongside the mapping, I would LOVE to be able to auto-link data to information in Fibery. Similar to the auto-relationship setting, but again, I’m happy to use XML/JSON instead of a UI to start. A simple example would be user data records that have an email to be linked with our User DB in Fibery, which can have much richer data like phone numbers etc. Then, being able to bring this data together makes things uniquely powerful just for Reports (I wouldn’t need it beyond) and the resulting source data table.
  3. Name and Save Data Source Tables: With this import, mapping and “linking” defined, I would love to be able name and save these data source tables. This would ensure that my whole team can use these sources to create the reports that they need without having to do all the cleanup and linking again and reuse whatever data there is. And if more data is needed, I can always look to improve the mapping and linking.

I’m not sure how many folks are using the reports. I love the tables and the charts, but find myself doing a lot of cleanup again and again when configuring the report and I’d hope to configure this once through a simple mapping document for further reuse.

I believe for the low-code “OS for your business”, this would be a powerful and essential value prop.

Thanks! :slightly_smiling_face:

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My comment moved to dedicated topic: Improving AI Workflow Tools in Fibery

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I think the situation you’re describing would be best accomplished with a custom integration combined with auto-linking where necessary.

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Thanks, @Chr1sG.

Yes. Custom integrations are definitely one way to do this right now.
However, building custom integrations have significant drawbacks:

  1. They are not low-code and do not enhance Fibery’s value proposition of being a company’s operating system.
  2. Also, they result in much duplicated development for any client. Especially as you already have Google Sheet integrations.

Again, I understand that engineering resources are limited and it’s crucial to figure out where to generate most ROI.
I still believe that these three items yield exponential ROI, especially if supporting a simple configuration markup and no UI.

I mean, the same argument is always there: One could have said that no need to build a Google Sheets integration, because people can build a custom integration instead.
I love the Google Sheet integration, it’s one of the arguments I can utilise to fend off arguments to replace Fibery with more specialised and established tools. :slightly_smiling_face:
This will make it even more sticky.

Thanks for considering!

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5

Agreed.

We use custom integrations, but I do believe Fibery is missing out on a direct way to dramatically increase adoption by adding more “ingestion” based integrations.

  • Google Sheets (domo’s): Too many to specify
  • Stripe (domo’s): Most SaaS companies (can see payments, link to customers/fibery crm and create internal tools e.g. refund; we bring in all payments → postgres → fibery custom app).
  • Quickbooks (domo’s): Entrepreneurs (and accountants/bookkeepers) (we are considering using a 3rd-party to sync to postgres → fibery custom app)
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Thanks for the input.
Let’s see what other users ask for. So far, we don’t get a lot of requests for specific integrations (or at least not enough to consider taking resources away from other feature development tasks).