🧐 Your opinion needed. Automations in Fibery (limitations and opportunities)

[Yuri_BC]

Okay here is another automations upgrade suggestion:

Buttons need the long awaited upgrade.

E..g.

Show default value if field left empty in Button form - Ideas & Features - Fibery.io Community

But there are hundreds of issues around Button. For convenience here the search results:

Search results for ‘button’ - Fibery.io Community

[Eva_Folch]

Is there a video about this, I don’t manage to find out how to set it? I need to filter a DB inside an entity (Expenses), that filters the past expenses of the same provider.

[Chr1sG]

Are you talking about dynamic relation filters?
There’s no video, but if you explain your db relations, and what you need to do, we can figure out what’s possible.

[Eva_Folch]

I want to view, every time I create an Entity in my Expenses DB, all the past Expenses from the same Shop provider. The easiest would be a lookup, but it does not order the fields or let me sort by date. If I do it by relation, I need to filter it by Shop, so A Dynamic filter, right? But I don’t find this option to filter by “This Entity Shop provide”…. In coda, I used to use a filtering formula, but I’m struggling a bit how to manage now.

I have the same problem when I want to have a table filtered by the Client - Company’s last projects. Which is difficult, because the project is related to a client, as I have different client for each Company, so I still want to see the past projects from the Company, even if the “Client” was someone else…uff, I hope I can explain myself.

[Eren_Turgut]

@Eva_Folch

I want to view, every time I create an Entity in my Expenses DB, all the past Expenses from the same Shop provider. The easiest would be a lookup, but it does not order the fields or let me sort by date. If I do it by relation, I need to filter it by Shop, so A Dynamic filter, right? But I don’t find this option to filter by “This Entity Shop provide”…. In coda, I used to use a filtering formula, but I’m struggling a bit how to manage now.

I have the same problem when I want to have a table filtered by the Client - Company’s last projects. Which is difficult, because the project is related to a client, as I have different client for each Company, so I still want to see the past projects from the Company, even if the “Client” was someone else…uff, I hope I can explain myself.

I had a similar problem: I wanted to see past Invoices to the same Contract Party.
For me what worked is to create an extra entity view “Past Invoices Info”, there take any relation collection field (in my case “Bookings”) → Table view, and simply change the top row from bookings to “Contract Party” with the dynamic filter active.

Looks a bit odd as the collection field is called Bookings but actually shows past invoices, but hey small prize to pay.

[Yuri_BC]

Another automation limitation:

Workspace-level overview of all automations enabled .
There is currently no way to see which automations are enabled and disabled throughout the entire workspace. This means that if users have many databases, orphan or unneeded automations can still be triggered and count to the total of automations per month, quickly running out of automations. I hope this becomes possible with a future workspace-level automations management dashboard.

Disable all automations for a database
In order to quickly disable all automations inside a database a switch at database level is needed. This I often have to do manually when working on or archiving new spaces / features I build in Fibery This could be handled also by the new workspace-level automations management dashboard.

[Eva_Folch]

@Eren_Turgut I guess you need Pro for that, because I can not find the option.

[Chr1sG]

@Eva_Folch

I want to view, every time I create an Entity in my Expenses DB, all the past Expenses from the same Shop provider.

I don’t quite understand. You are creating an Expense, but you want to see existing Expenses for ‘the same shop provider’. Are you saying you want to see other expenses during the process of creating an Expense? Where do you expect to see this?
Or do you mean that once you have created an Expense, you want to have a collection on this entity that always shows all previous Expenses for the same provider?

@Eva_Folch

I have the same problem when I want to have a table filtered by the Client - Company’s last projects.

A table of what?

@Eva_Folch

I have different client for each Company, so I still want to see the past projects from the Company, even if the “Client” was someone else…uff, I hope I can explain myself.

Sorry. I’m not getting it.

Can you explain it like I am 5 ?

e.g.

I have these dbs: X, Y, Z.
They have the following basic fields:
X: Due date (date), Priority (select field)
Y: Effort (number)
Z: Action (text)
They are related as follows:
X 1:m Y
Y m:m Z

When I am looking at an entity of type Z I want to see any entities of type X that are linked to a Y which is linked to this Z entity.
or
When I am looking at an entity of type Z and choosing to link an entity of type Y, I only want to see those where Effort > 5
or
I want to create a table view of Y entities, filtered so that only those that are linked to an entity of type X with priority = High

[bear]

I just wrote this here:

PDF generation feature requests to solve some pains and roadblocks

Hi there! First of all, I love being able to make PDFs with HTML. It is very powerful and I have come a long way to making what I want to make. However, as I was working on it there were some pains and some roadblocks that made it difficult to reach the result I wanted. I keep looking for some workarounds but I wanted to communicate what I encountered by doing a bunch of feature requests for this functionality of generating PDFs using HTML templates. Here they are: Enabling resizing of the co…

I guess this is all related to this topic! I want to reply here separately to answer all questions asked in the OP.

[Eren_Turgut]

You need pro for multiple entity views yes, but you can also just put it within your only entity view, at the bottom maybe?

[Chr1sG]

@Eren_Turgut

You need pro for multiple entity views yes, but you can also just put it within your only entity view, at the bottom maybe?

Not correct.
You only need pro if you want to have rules to automatically choose the entity view:

[Eren_Turgut]

Oh that changed, thank you for correcting!

[Eva_Folch]

So…I want to see the past expenses I had from the same provider, in each expense entity. I only achieve this with a many-to-many relation. But why do I need two relation fields for that? I always end up deleting one, when I don’t remember anymore why is there. I started naming them “Don’t delete”

To my Non-code brain, it would be easier to have a one-to-many relation, that I can filter by this entity “Shop Provider”. A lookup would be even better, but with the ability to sort and reorder the fields.

Here is a screenshot of the entity view:

[Chr1sG]

@Eva_Folch

I want to see the past expenses I had from the same provider, in each expense entity.

You can just use a formula, no?

Provider.Expenses.Filter(Date < [This Expense].Date)

[Eva_Folch]

Is this not the same as lookup? Like you say, with a formula, I can also not order the fields, and sorting descending by date is also not possible, right? Or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!

[Eren_Turgut]

@Eva_Folch

So…I want to see the past expenses I had from the same provider, in each expense entity. I only achieve this with a many-to-many relation. But why do I need two relation fields for that? I always end up deleting one, when I don’t remember anymore why is there. I started naming them “Don’t delete”

Try this:

Create the formula [provider].[expenses] → it’s a self-relation or look-up (idk if I’m using the correct term here but doesn’t matter)

Create a new field → Relation to… → Take any database, preferably a helper database, let’s call it “HelperDB” and create relation:

Expense has many HelperDB
HelperDB has one Expense

Now you should be able to see or enable collection view of HelperDB within Expense entity view. Now configure that view, in the Rows, change top level from “HelperDB” to “Expenses” → it should automatically take Expenses of the provider from the formula field, but now you configure and sort at will.

Did I understand correctly, does that help?

[timothy]

Can’t you apply a sort in a formula? That doesn’t fix ordering the
fields, but it may help with sorting.

[Chr1sG]

I realise now that I misunderstood this line

@Eva_Folch

When linking entities, it would be great to:

• Filter lookup options dynamically, ex… by Client Name from the current entity.

as meaning that you wanted to apply filtering to the dropdown box of options that appears when linking items, but I guess now it was about ‘creating a lookup collection field with filtering’.

@Eva_Folch

Is this not the same as lookup? Like you say, with a formula, I can also not order the fields, and sorting descending by date is also not possible, right?

No, you’re right, formulas (and lookups) do not behave like ‘normal’ relation views, so if that’s essential, then your options are somewhat limited.
But we do have that in our backlog to address:

Alternatively, your issue would possibly be solved by this:

Automatic linking - increase possibilities beyond "equals"

Is there a specific reason we cannot have auto-link conditions other than “=”? [image] For my use case I would need larger or smaller than comparisons with date fields and regex / “contains” capabilities: If cost center (booking) = cost center (budget category line) Booking date (booking) >= period start (budget category line) Booking date (booking) <= period end (budget category line) Cost element (booking, string) [is within] Concat cost elements (budget category line) Use case simplif…

[Chr1sG]

@timothy

Can’t you apply a sort in a formula? That doesn’t fix ordering the
fields, but it may help with sorting.

No. Formula sorting is ‘backend’. It is not intended to affect the UI.

[Eva_Folch]

Thank you! Would be wonderful, sort, filters & everything in lookups, that would solve a lot of my workflows.

I will take a look at your suggestion, but so far a compromise for me is the many-to- many relations, with auto-linking…but looking forward to the lookup update then