Polymorphic relations. When creating relation, ability to have many Types from which to choose, and not just one Type

Ideas & Features
62

It is theoretically possible, but I’d not recommend it.
Extracting references from rich text is a PITA.
References are great for adhoc relations where you don’t need to leverage them elsewhere.
As soon as you want to build upon them (formulas, automations, lookups) they become less useful.
Anything you built might get superseded by genuine polymorphism at some point :wink: so your work would be wasted.

For the time being, if you must have links to many dbs, it’s probably better to just use multiple relations and optimise the UX/UI with thoughtful relation views and field hiding.
If you can afford to wait a while, that’s probably going to yield the best result :blush:

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63

Wow, can you share the link of the item in Roadmap. Thanks.

64

It may not look like it, but this item is the first of several that may be helpful for you
https://the.fibery.io/@public/Public_Roadmap/Roadmap-Board-5974#Roadmap_Item/Highlight-Creation-212

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65

I, too, wonder if the concept of ‘tags’ wouldn’t accomplish a lot here. Creating a new entity type and then associating it with lots of other entity types (if I understand that’s what’s being suggested) seems a little like overkill for many use cases, if a person could just create some tags that can be applied all over the place in Fibery.

66

Have been running into some use cases recently where this feature would be very helpful. How’s the development coming along?

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67

True polymorphic relations are some way away, sorry.

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68

@Chr1sG Hi, is there some relationship between Highlights and Polymorphic?

69

What do you think? :wink:

Under the hood, ‘highlights’ is a special kind of database which supports what we call ‘multi-relations’, that is the ability to link to a single entity from any of several databases.
So a highlight has a ‘source’ multi-relation and a ‘target’ multi-relation, and the configuration of highlights determines which dbs are available for each of these.

i.e. Source 1:n Highlight n:1 Target

The result is the ability to link (indirectly) from any source-db entities to any target-db entities.
At the moment, the source dbs have to have a rich text field, because the ‘highlight’ is bound to a specific snippet of text.
On the source entity, the highlight shows as a selected piece of text, and on the target it shows as a feed-view like relation field.

In the long-term, the same underlying tech could allow entities to be linked via multi-relations in a less restricted way.
So you could say, that highlights is a v specific (and limited) form of polymorphism, but we do have plans to make it more powerful… just no ETA :person_shrugging:

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