Not sure if anyone else is interested in this, but I was thinking about a search box inside of entity views.
I see this as a field that could be enabled where a search textbox is added on the view.
Typing inside of the textfield would search based on connections to the given entity (like the conditional filter on existing boards).
So if you have a relation to other databases, that it will show the relationships based on the search parameter (text).
I don’t know if I understand. There’s a search per view here:
You mean a box that will search through all the related entities at once across relations? Where would they show up? What’s the use case?
What if, when opening a search panel to the left or right, it prioritizes entities linked the entity you opened the search panel from?
So for us, we tag stuff with a project. Sometimes you just want to find something connected to that one project.
We try to setup the View of our Projects as a sort of project dashboard. Right now we set up these boards for our individual connected relations, and people can filter in those, its just not as nice of a workflow.
I can see that it is a bit niche. Alternatively it could work as a parameter for the default workspace wide search option, which will be set if you open Search from inside of the entity:
Changing it to a search-in-entity option, where Entity can be replaced by the DB entry / type (Project, Person, Meeting, whatever)
As an additional point on searching in boards. Boards dont load all of the data, so if you have a large database then you only see a subsection of your connected entities.
More annoying is that if you search, it only searches inside of the loaded entites, so it makes you think that an entity does not exist, while its actually just not being loaded / shown.
This limitation makes board-based search basically useless for any situation with more than a couple dozen entries.
Example:
The smart folder with the entries
Versus the board (it only shows a couple of entries and no way to show the rest).
In some boards it has a “show all” button, which is just annoying and even power users in our team forget that they need to press it.
Okay interesting. A few thoughts:
If you change to Table View/Board view + “Line” size, it will load all entities with no “Load More” button. (You said you have board view not, but looks like its actually a list view). (Board view has a limit of 1,500 before it shows the “Show all” button. But table view is infinite:)
What you can do is make a relation view called “Everything” and have it show all related databases in that relation view. Then you can use the search in there to find what you are looking for. Something like this:
Would this solve it though?
Hey, thank you for thinking along.
So #1 would work in theory, but from a UX perspective it is quite poor. We have less technical staff on-team as well, and changing things like a Wiki into a table view would be confusing from a visual and interaction perspective.
I dont think there is a wat to embed a new board/view on an entity view, is there? I could make my own search-in-entity with a simple Table, as long as its clear that this is not the default wiki/task view.
If its less that 1500 entries, you can make it board view with size:line. (this would only work if only have one level of heirarchy though)
Not directly, as an extra widget, but you can have it as a Pinned “Multiple Relation Views”. If you DO want it another widget, you can make a new database called “Everything Search” and relate that to your Projects database, it will then make a Relation View there. You can then just not show the entities in the actual relation, and show entities from other relations (as shown in screenshot above). This “Everything Search” database will be completely empty. Just there in order to have the widget.
I do this often for CRM, when I have databases for “Calls”, “Meetings”, “Emails”. But I want to see it as a single “Activity” Stream. So I have it related to an “Activity” database, and it just shows the calls, meetings and emails. Doesn’t even try showing the activity database as that would allow people to add entities to it and thats not desireable.
It feels a bit dirty, but the empty database relation thing definitely solves our immediate need.
Thank you for the suggestion, for now this does seem like the best solution. Its a creative way to solve the issue at hand.
Agreed completely!! Hahah, but indeed the best thing we found for now.
