Ok thanks for responding! I don’t think that’s a “relevant” discussion - it’s a quick question asking if your needs can be met another way. I really don’t see any guidance around this since the original response by Michael in Nov. ‘19 - by the way, he changed the subject to “Polymorphic” from my original request, so that gave me hope that this was a real feature they were focused on and wanted to develop. The thing is, since Nov. ‘19 I really can’t pin down any subsequent mention of the feature, so my fear is it’s gone way out of the priorities, if even planned at all!
Summer would be great, and I hope we get some indication it’s at least still planned! Would make me, for one, very more confident about my future activity in Fibery. You are right it’s a huge feature that could really solve some of the issue that Notion and other no codes don’t deal well with. Part of my hope here is that due to Michael’s discussion of this, I actually thought Fibery may be the first with such a feature, since I have actually never seen the likes of Coda, Airtable, Zenkit, etc. even acknowledge that they’d consider such a useful feature in the first place!
Yes, that’s a fair enough point. I guess I took @mdubakov 's response as an acknowledgement that they’re still thinking about the problem, which although it was not a “yes we’re going to implement this” response, was still a cautiously positive sign to my mind.
We’re all pretty clear in this thread that bidirectional links and other things are not going to address the core need. I imagine the implementation may be challenging for them, so I’m sure it takes some more thought, but hopefully they are doing that. I agree that an update on whether that’s even the case would be good.
In fact if they are really not planning to implement it that would be important to know. Certainly it would be disappointing, but I’d rather them share that news now. I don’t think it would drive me away on its own, depending on other things they may implement (like field groups and tabs) it may be workable for me.
No question this is a big piece and I can’t think of any other app that is based around relational database type linking of entities/rows has figure this out. They all wind up with some sort of another of “field proliferation” if you want to relate one item in a Table to many, many others. Notion and Coda have nice solutions now to hide fields so you can limit this somewhat, but it’s not useful if you need to relate to those fields from time to time. So if the Fibery team can solve this, it will be huge, and I think worth the work they’ll need to put into it. But that’s right, it would be very useful to know if it’s still planned given how little info we have of late.
As I move forward in Fibery I am really plagued by this issue I described above, about being able to group big parts of my Fibery:
Thanks to Fibery being set up by grouping its data tables in Apps, if Polymorphic does come along, this issue would be completely solved and it would make building in Fibery very intuitive and much more flexible than right now. So I just want to call attention to this particular need yet again!
Polymorphic relations are not so hard to implement, it maybe take ~2 months for 1 person. The problem is that it is not a priority. First we will focus on better permissions and other pressing things that customer asks MUCH more often.
I do think that eventually we will get to it, but you should not expect this feature in the next 6 months.
You should understand that we can’t create plans for more than 2-3 months ahead, since we are a startup and things change quite often when we discover new information.
Michael, it’s a shock to me to read your message. You are the CEO of a startup who created an online community to illicit feedback about your product, and you are here publicly embarrassing me, the author of more liked posts by any other member, and a paying customer, calling me a “complainer”. It’s amazing to me you’d allow yourself to do such name calling in the public forum, without taking this up privately at least and putting in effort not to humiliate me this way.
You yourself marked up this post with the title “Polymorphic Relations,” for over 14 months with any guidance around the actual plans on this feature. You guys actively ask for “unsweetened” feedback, so when I point out this fact, I get labeled as “complaining.” Are you sure you can handle blunt, accurate feedback? It appears judging by your response to me that I’ve made you uncomfortable by stating the facts.
You know well I read every single piece of information you publish about your roadmap. Your monthly posts bypass most of the requests in the community that you guys don’t respond to. It is hard to find anywhere what actually guides your decision making about your roadmap. The Vizydrop chart you published isn’t exactly easy to read, and if you can show me where you’ve published information about how it ties into your WIP, I’d like to see that. That would solve a lot of my concern that I am simply candidly expressing, feedback you guys eagerly request all the time!
I won’t bother yet again to list all the requests in this community that are poorly addressed. I have taken time to document many of them before, and you guys didn’t respond. If you are satisfied with the way you are handling feedback in here, then I get the message and will not spend any more of my time trying to point out areas I think you can improve.
In closing, I will say that I’m active and vocal in a lot of other communities of competing products, but I have never been close to insulted like this. I wonder if you’re aware of the message you’re sending at this fragile stage of your growth re: how you handle when you are called out legitimately. You own this forum and I guess you can do whatever you want in here. I can tell you that you have just gone a long way to permanently damage my view of Fibery.
And @Oshyan and @Chr1sG, judging by you both “hearting” end endorsing that comment, I assume you also think I’m a complainer. Borderline painful to see that…
I think you are drawing too dramatic a conclusion from my “heart” reaction. Michael shared what I view to be useful information and I appreciate that he did, that is all. I do not need to endorse the entirety of his - or anyone’s - message to feel it is worth expressing some appreciation for.
It is unfortunate that there is difficulty between you, and I can understand you feeling hurt by his comment, but it’s neither my place nor my wish to comment or take sides beyond that. It certainly saddens me to see conflict though, and I hope the two of you can resolve it.
For the avoidance of doubt, I will state that I too did not intend my heart to indicate endorsement of all that was contained in Michael’s post.
I would also add that having worked in several countries, with people of varying backgrounds, who didn’t necessarily share a common native language, I have found it useful to follow the adage ‘assume positive intent’. From what I have seen on this forum, I believe that both Michael and B_Sp have good intentions.
Michael, @Oshyan and @Chr1sG, Ok, I appreciate those comments. I’m not up for conflict so I’m ready to move on from this thread at this point. I do want to make the point though in closing this out that I really was surprised to be labelled a “complainer,” because the Fibery team encourages in multiple forums “unsweetened” and “unfiltered” feedback. I have thought about all I post in this forum, and I really think I am simply providing just that type of feedback - unsweetened. I back up most of my comments, especially the ones that may be construed as questioning how votes are counted, or pointing out large gaps in communicating about features, etc. I always thought the Fibery team would rather hear that type of feedback - based on the encouraging of ALL feedback, not just positive.
And all three of you will probably be glad to hear that although I had to give up my Fibery license for my team about a month ago, we ultimately determined Fibery had more to offer than it had shortcomings, and we are back on the paid plan and I’ll be adding further users soon. So all this diatribe aside, the bottom line is Fibery has held up for my Team’s use. I look forward to further feature development now that we’re back, and I will say that it was very good to hear that Polymorphic is still on the roadmap. It’s a true game-changer for us and we really can’t wait for it to come out.
Glad that you’re back on the Fibery train! I think we all benefit from your perspective.
Just my view on the discussion: if I can apply my translator from Eastern European, I believe Michael’s original statement, which was:
Not sure why you constantly complain about lack of transparency,
Basically says:
I don’t fully follow your consistent view that we lack transparency,
And indeed, the great thing about Eastern Europeans’ desire for unfiltered feedback is that it comes from a selfish place: they wish to give unfiltered feedback back to us
Definitely glad to hear, although I certainly don’t want anyone using a product they’re not overall happy with. Hopefully Fibery is striking enough of that balance for now; it seems like that’s the case. I know there is no tool perfect for my needs, but so far Fibery is the best compromise. Hopefully it becomes less and less of a compromise over time! Now if only we could multiply the team and have each copy of them focus on different niches, like our own!
I came across this need as well and wanted to describe a use case that would help. I am running my coordination meetings with our other orgs in Fibery at the moment. We create tasks that can be associated with many different levels of the data we have modeled. Products, Components, Campaigns, Initiatives, etc. However, in some contexts, having a relation to each is a bit overwhelming and complicated to select.
In a traditional task management system, you’d have a Tags field where you can apply one or many tags that are likely related to some structured concept. I could see where if we could include multiple Types as a source for a single relationship, then you could have your cake and eat it too.
The only other way I could see doing this is leveraging automation to keep a Tags Type in sync with all the Types you want to include in it, but that could get hard to manage.
Hey @Michael_DM, great to get your support on this!
Can you do me a favor and “heart” the original post? We are not sure, but as @Oshyan and I have wondered, there’s a chance that votes are only counted if the original post gets “hearts,” and not commentary within the actual request. This is a huge need for many here, so would like to make sure it’s getting all the points in the Fibery backlog that it can!
Hey @mdubakov we have had flurry of new users requesting this, and the original post is up to 9 hearts in here Discourse, I don’t know of any other request here that has so much support - although I wish you guys would provide a way you could see that here in Discourse.
So any chance you guys have moved this up in your priority from the comment you made that I quoted a four months ago now? You are getting a lot of requests for this.
Ah yes, Polymorphic…funny I was thinking the last week how to add in some additional use case stuff to try to move that along. You’ll recall @mdubakov mentioned here that the work involved isn’t too complex:
In an effort to paraphrase what I wanted to explain as a much more detailed post, I am seeing an increased need for Polymorphic around creating hierarchical “grouping” style Apps. A situation where I would use an app and a series of child Types to group other Types, much like you’d use Folders in an old-school file system. The key is that in some cases you need just one level of hierarchy, in others say 4 or 5. Without Polymorphic, you have to always have the bottom level used , otherwise you would need to create extra relations to have something grouped on a higher level than the bottom.
So say you have something like this:
Function → Subfunction → Specialization → Area
This would be used in categorizing some work in a business, such as:
Marketing → SEO…in this case, you would not need to go down further to level 3 and 4, but you might have:
Marketing → Paid Campaigns → SEM → Google Ads…in this case the four levels are essential, as you could have another one here after “SEM” of “Facebook Ads” right?
With Polymorphic, I can choose at which level I relate to the entire App described here. That is just like if I’m creating a file folder in, say, Google Docs, for my Company functions. I can create folders on more than one level, and that works nicely.
Let’s hope Polymorphic continues to gain support - I’m glad to see it’s so popular now with Votes, although not sure if that’s giving it enough weight on the overall points scheme within the entire feedback system on the Fibery Roadmap!
Hopefully it becomes less and less of a compromise over time! Now if only we could multiply the team and have each copy of them focus on different niches, like our own!
