More Capability to edit/view related entities in Collections - aka Subtables

[B_Sp]

Hi again,

I would like to suggest more capability around the Collections/Relations feature in cards. This is a great start and you are just a few steps from having available bonafide Subtables embedded within these cards, which for my use of Fibery would be a huge benefit.

I used to use Confluence to run meetings. My team had a table for Agenda items, and each row was a topic. As this was nothing more than a doc, after the meeting the rows in the table were no longer useful for the team: They couldn’t be transitioned to other statuses, broken down, closed, etc. So if there was an idea, a question, a decision in the meeting that was written in a point in this table, the only way to act on it moving forward was to copy and paste and create a new entity in Jira around it. But time had already been spent writing it up in the meeting note. So real inefficiencies here.

If we had just a bit more capability in the connections area, we’d have some real potential to have the functionality of a free-form table that you can have in the canvas of Rich Text in Fibery, but with all the benefit of keeping context as these are actually entities. Then you could duplicate this meeting note Confluence set up. But with a big advantage, in what would be a differentiator for Fibery: For the individual Discussion Topic to be the reference item, not just the originating Meeting Entity. This is key as it allows the team not to lose track of items discussed in a meeting, which if simply in a text field, are not trackable, and can easily get lost in a “black hole” since these notes can be hard to find later unless somebody remembers them.

What I’d like to see to accomplish this:

• Integration of “Rich Text” field into this view. I just posted a suggestion for adding Rich Text field visibility into Table view, and these features would be great to have in these collection views as well:

https://community.fibery.io/t/more-visible-content-in-table-view-in-particular-rich-text/517

• It would be great to click into any related field that is an entity in this collections area and type its contents without having to pop up the other entity.

• Some ability to mouse over the particular fields in the related entity and see its contents, or click and have a quick preview. Very useful to gain more context without fully navigating to that entity.

This post also discusses some points about added visibility in these connection areas:

[✔︎ DONE] Display more information/fields in collection view

Wanted to add the big +1, a recurring theme I’ve been posting about across the community! You guys are off to a great start so far, but if this could morph into a sort of Excel/Sheets type table, where you could yourself set column width, also add some more fields which are currently unavailable like “rich text” and “collections” if there is a many-to-many relationship between Types. We really use this a lot to get more context out of related entities, in particular seeing what related entitie…

Thanks guys!

[Oshyan]

Digging up an old post, but as I am preparing to write a new feature request, I wanted to make sure nothing exactly like it had been suggested before.

I’m interested in your specific meeting example here and I’m wondering if your proposed solution makes the most sense, or if the feature I have in mind (embeddable Views) would solve it as well or better (i.e. more flexibly, with many other users).

Specifically, when you talk about the meeting notes example, are you wanting each agenda item to be its own entity? Or are you wanting the ability to have a spreadsheet/table view within a document, with agenda items written, but not yet linked to an Entity, and then selectively turn some of them into entities? You see the difference there?

If you want every agenda item to be an entity, then you could of course just have an “agenda item” Type and then link the relevant agenda items to each Meeting entity with a relation. Obviously this doesn’t give you all the capabilities you’re looking for, but if doing this would get you some of what you want, then I think it tells us useful things about the original request.

Check out my new feature request and see if it would address yours:

[DONE] Embed Custom Views into Entity View

This has been mentioned several times in various posts and requests, but never really seemed to have its own clear feature request, and I think it’s important: We need the ability to embed arbitrary Views into Rich Text fields anywhere (including Documents). Notion is really the best existing example of this and for the most part it handles this very well. You can embed a view of a database (Type) and filter and sort it as you desire. You can change the view type, card, calendar, list, gallery.…

[B_Sp]

Hey Oshyan, thanks for weighing in on this one, appreciate the time looking at it and the feedback, this remains one of my biggest needs and not really solved fully in Fibery yet!

This is a great dilemma - should all “Talking points” be entities, or just some? One of my big needs is to track mgmt meetings in a tool. I have looked at about every solution out there, none really do the trick. Key on my wish list:

• Affected Entities trace back to the meeting where decisions are made about them. This seems mostly logical to accomplish in the comments stream, ie “we decided in meeting X we will do this…”
• Newly created entities within a meeting can be seen to have originated there. My team often has work get stale, and when going over it and trying to review, we at times lose track of why something got in the system
• Some good ideas come out of meetings, at times ad hoc and related to existing procedures, guidelines, etc and it is great to record that

I had actually eagerly anticipated Highlights as a way to just turn those Talking Points into entities that required that. But Highlights remain limited in the context they show, that’s a main reason I made this request:

Highlights Enhancement - include in Reference text that would typically relate to topic of Highlight

Hi guys, Enjoying Highlights, and I wanted to suggest an enhancement that I think would help in the natural way Docs are created and Highlights are referenced. If there is a bullet outline below the text where the Highlight is, pull that into the reference: In this case, you might write something like this: Notion: has more time on the market than Fibery Does not have the Highlight feature that Fibery does If you wanted to make sure to see those bullets in this reference, you’d have to u…

I have found that when trying to use Highlights for this need, we can’t really get at a glance enough context when reading the Highlight. We have also used Roam for meetings incidentally, and their implementation of the references was much more thorough so I’m hoping Fibery gets to that soon.

Without the benefit of Highlights, of late I’ve wound up having every Agenda Item in the meeting its own entity. In turn it needs to relate to something in the System, such as a task, project, business area, etc. This also leads to a ton of Relations and one of the reasons you’ve seen me talking about Polymorphic and more arbitrary relating capability.

And to close, not to bring it up again, but Notion actually handles my need better right now, for a few reasons:

• I can write into the related Linked db where I keep the Agenda Times in the meeting
• I can use a “simple text” field - while not ideal - to write in quick notes, and can make primitive bullets hitting “shift” + “enter.” Also @mentions work in those types of fields in Notion, they don’t in Fibery.

And sorry this is so long, but one more thing that occurs to me is that with your request, I’m not sure how you’d get the relation back to the Meeting entity unless that embed in Rich Text picked it up. This is where the Notion example shines because you at least get the relation via the linked db.

Hope that all makes sense and is useful, too!

[Oshyan]

Hmm! Interesting. The way you describe it, it really seems like there would be a decent approach in Fibery with existing functionality. And I’m having trouble visualizing why Notion is better, in particular.

We don’t need to keep hashing this out, though I appreciate your response here. But if you want to continue the discussion and you have the time/energy, I’d be curious to see a short video demo, at least of your Notion approach and its benefits, if not your Fibery attempts and limitations. If not, no worries. I’m sure Michael and team will do the best they can to balance all these related requests and give us something useful.