Inline formulas

Ideas & Features
1

Does Fibery have inline formulas (like Coda?)

2

Not yet, but it should!

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3
  • link entity → take property → for dynamical number for example
  • hide entity name to have only a number/value, a small effect, backgroud or other to differentiate
4

Not sure I understand what you mean. Can you explain more, maybe with a screen grabs or sketches

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5

I could be off-base so this might all be off-topic. :smile: That said I believe what they might want is something like an in-line field display from a linked entity, which is something I’ve wanted before (and which I believe Coda can do, and is very powerful). Right now when you link to an entity A: You can’t not display the name, B: the displayed field contents/values are the same for every link to that type of Entity/Database. The latter makes a lot of sense in general, and the former somewhat too. But it would be great if there was some other way of linking/referencing an Entity in-line with more power/flexibility as far as what data is drawn from that Entity.

So for a simple (and perhaps not very compelling, but at least functional) example I am writing a report document to share with my team at the end of the month. I have a Sprint Entity that counts all Tasks in Done state. Normally I would just put a placeholder like “We completed XX tasks in our sprint this month, good job!” or whatever. Then at the end of the month before I share it, I go and update that value manually. What if I could just link to #sprint-abc and select to only display the “Tasks Completed” field? It would display like any other Field in a Linked Entity does now, but for this one instance it would only display that one Field Value, and it would of course update dynamically as the Entity itself changes.

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6

Your example sounds a lot like this, right?

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7

Yes, similar, but not necessarily the same. That’s in-line formulas, which Coda can do and essentially supports the feature request here (as I see it), but also a lot more. I guess I’d consider that one to be a parent feature of this one in a sense, in that you could implement this one with the functionality of that one, but this here could be a smaller-scoped request (or maybe not, I don’t know how the code works). Also I could be totally wrong about this one. :sweat_smile:

8

Look forward to hearing what @Mathieu_24 has to say :slightly_smiling_face:

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9

Yes, that’s it. Like Coda.
I love fibery really powerful but still some limitations on documents block us / formula in doc.
Example: insert a column formula from an entity.

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10

Yes its same. Or possibility hide entity name

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11

Coincidentally, we had a discussion about this feature last week, but demand is low, like 3-5 requests in the last 3 years, so not a high priority for us so far… Implementation also has some problems due to permissions/access.

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12

:point_up: Upvoted. Coming from Coda, this is the #1 thing I miss. (Chris knows.) Though I’d be thrilled to have ‘simple’ field insertion in the meanwhile [if not full-blown formula insertion] anywhere/everywhere. I’m trying to build dynamic modular docs/interfaces at a granular level - initially internally, and eventually externally. :smirk: Fibery is freaking amazing.

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13

I would love to be have fields that are contextually filtered by the entity they’re being viewed in. Is that what everyone means by an inline formula?

@Oshyan’s sprint example is exactly the type of thing we’re trying to do so

If so, I’ll happily put a vote towards it! I made a similar request here that should maybe be merged?

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14

Formula fields are ‘contextually filtered’ by the entity, but not ‘contextually filtered’ by the view, which I think is what you are describing in the topic you linked to.

I think this topic is about displaying (calculated) info within rich text.

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15

Inline Formula (formulas on canvas) would be amazing!!! I also come from Coda, and I really miss this!

I can have in my dashboard, live counters, for example: how many sales in the month, how many expenses, totals by client, etc…. Everything in one view….
I think once you try it, you cannot go back. It’s one of the main reasons why I switched from Notion to Coda! Super powerful!

16

It’s worth noting that I would love the feature but never post about it. I’m too busy trying to explore the features you’ve already shipped!
That said, inline formulas are so powerful (and and present performance issues at scale).

Today’s work around looks like a database with two simple columns. One name and one value.

  1. Create an automation OR API call that populates the value of one entity with whatever statistic or phrase you need.
  2. Mention the entity in Fibery.
  3. Configure all mentions of this database to reveal the value.

It does not scale, so it’s better used as a cache of global variables across the workspace.

1 Like