Recently I was sharing a public link for an entity and noticed that the public view was based on the first view in a list. Changing the order of views would change the public view.
For my Task entity I have 2 views (Focus, All)
I’m not sure if this is a bug or if it’s a hidden feature but if it’s a feature that’s very exciting. It would mean that it’s possible to specify/control the view that’s used for public links.
Publicly shared entities have the “Lookup” component as relations instead of the proper Relation View component:
Internal:
Shared to web:
(Plus there is no ability to set which fields to show here.)
Controlling extended access is great, but it would be even better if the public links showed the relation views that are set up on the entity view. Currently it shows just a list view with the relations, not respecting the view type, filters, colors, etc.
It would be a bit confusing if the Context Filter in the relation was turned off, as there would be a discrepancy between the internal and public link due to access, but I think it’s still worth it overall.
This would solve a whole lot of use cases for “Public Link to View”. in almost all cases you can make relate those things to a different entity, then share that entity with it’s related items as the “View” container.
As you know, what gets shown for an entity view relation field can depend on the user who is viewing it (as is true for any data view) since it will be affected by their permissions and by certain filters (e.g. assigned to Me).
We wanted to move away from the situation where the public entity view could look different depending on who had enabled sharing.
It’s actually the other way around! Sharing data views (tables, boards, timelines, etc.) is tricky, but if/when we solve it, sharing relation views in a way that more closely resembles the entity view as seen by an internal user may become possible (but with the same caveat as above).
I thought that the tricky part was around access. And that sharing a view means sharing access to the entities within a filtered view. This was what I understood to be the main difficulty and resistance to sharing views. Hence the suggestion above.
I see… Are there other examples other than “is me” where this is true? Can’t filters like that be disabled in public settings then? Or relation views with those filters be hidden from the list?
But now the model has changed where it doesn’t matter who enabled sharing. No? The permissions are based on access templates.
So outside of the “is me” filter which could cause issues, I don’t understand why not enable this.
For a publicly shared view, the entities shown in the relation field list are simply those entities which are related to the entity being viewed.
However, there are many ways in which the relation view on an (internally viewed) entity view can show things other than this sent of entities, e.g. due to grouping, filtering etc.
Think of it like the following: given an entity, I can write a (backend) query which will tell me what other entities are related to it via a given relation field.
There is however no simple query I can write which will tell me what items are currently shown in a given relation field view (internal), since the relation field view can be configured to show almost anything, and this configuration is ‘frontend’, and the results may depend on the user.
Accordingly, the public entity view simply shows what the result of the first type of query gives for each relation field, displayed as a list.
Yes, exactly. This is what the most recent change meant.
Yeah, this makes sense.
But I also think that with the new access control, the user can control what access it is publicly shared with to ensure that the access is given to the entities in the relation views. And if access is not given, it would still show those views without the related entities. I would argue (but maybe your data can back it up) that 90% of relation views are indeed just showing the related data.
We’ll definitely think about what options are available.
You may be right that the majority of relation views rely only on directly related entities (I don’t have the data) but it’s also fair to say that this issue (that publicly shared entity view does not look the same as the internally-viewed entity view) has not been something we have heard a lot of complaints about.
BTW, it seems like this topic is a duplicate of this, so I have merged.
Indeed, I somehow missed it!
Makes sense! Honestly it’s not a direct need I (or any of my clients) have. But it would make the “Public Entity Sharing” feel more complete. More of a nice to have.
Main reason I bring it up as I see more and more people on Notion’s subreddit asking to share views publicly securely (i know those two words don’t work great together, but that’s what they need). So a client portal that is just via a link and not needed to log in. This COULD be possible in Fibery in terms of access (especially with the new update), but the UI isn’t there yet to make it look good publicly.
