This post is two parts: one part idea / one part question for existing capabilities.
Idea: It would be awesome to be able to quickly reference the entities fields inside an entities rich text field. Since I already have access to all of this structured data, I should be able to easily use those “live” values within my writing (I can’t find it, but I’m sure this has been referenced before, so I won’t make a new post).
Question: I have a template database, new entities tied to those templates would copy the templates description. Inside the template, I want to use markdown to reference the fields in the future entities created from the template. But when I override the description, it doesn’t work (see image below). Referencing fields only seems to be possible if the markdown is written inside the action/button rather than referenced from somewhere else. Is there a way to reference markdown outside of the automation/button fields?
(I want to write this information inside a template entity rather than in the automation itself so that a non-admin team can control what these templates look like)
Answer to 2.
When considering rich text you need to think of it as existing in two versions: what is stored on the backend, and what is shown on the UI.
The former is Fibery-augmented markdown and the latter is formatted text.
In general, the only things on the UI that can change without a corresponding underlying change in the markdown is how mentioned items are displayed (the mentioned item can itself change and the choice of visible fields can be changed).
All other markdown is ‘static’.
When a rich text field is created using an automation, it is possible to use Fibery-specific syntax to determine the markdown contents at run time. So, something like {{Status.Name}} will generate a different value depending on when the automation is run. But once run, the value is ‘hard-coded’ into the markdown.
It’s a bit like ‘passing by value’ (versus ‘passing by reference’).
When you write something in the UI, it is simply converted to markdown for storage. It is not being ‘processed’ in the same way as happens when an automation processes the Fibery-specific syntax.
So, to answer your question, it’s not currently possible to write something in the UI that will be ‘processed’ when that field is copied.
Don’t know how comprehensible/useful that answer is!
You can do this with a script that reads the Template Rich Text description and replaces all the “{{field references}}” with the corresponding field values from the referenced entity(ies).
Not the simplest thing though, because Fibery disallows Javascript eval and similar capabillities.
