Issues with Cross Doc

Product Feedback Bugs
1

Starting a running thread of issues with Cross Doc that I’ve run into.

I always encounter them, then forget about them, then encounter them again. So, might as well give visibility.

I’ll sort these into issues that break flow (the ability to work productively without distraction), vs break workflows (i.e. it causes you or users not to be able to do a thing which would otherwise require inconvenient workarounds or wouldn’t be possible at all)

Workflow breaking

  1. Can’t add new elements to a list if the table was crossed doc’d in (e.g. want to do this

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Flow breaking

  1. Sync times are incredibly slow
  2. The Refresh button confuses non-coda users
  3. Adding a column in the source doc doesn’t prompt you to show it in the columns (by default, would expect that new columns in source doc would flow through: makes sense why not, but a user visual prompt of some sort would help, e.g. New Columns! on the select columns view)
  4. Adding a column to a sync doesn’t automatically make it visible, meaning to get it to be visible you have to wait for the sync to happen (see flow issue #1) and then go into columns and mark as visible
  5. Column names get changed when syncing (some words change to lowercase, some spaces are removed around symbols)

There are more, and you’ve also run into them, please share and i’ll update this list, hopefully it can be useful to the team as they build out the new Database experience

2

I fully recognize the issues, I also believe that the new power tables may solve most of these issues. I am waiting eagerly for the beta of these workspace tables. Cheers, Christiaan

3

I am afraid that I will get older by another year before that happens.

4

don’t mind me, just waiting another 5 minutes for cross doc to sync, oh look my meeting started before I could get my little task done guess I’ll have to add this to the todo list, what was it I was trying to do again?

5

With your skills, you could’ve moved to webhook sync logic long ago! I agree that Cross-docs are underperforming and we need clarity on Power Tables and permissions ASAP. I wouldn’t be surprised if the current Cross-doc setup is nearing its end-of-life.

6

webhook sync is faster?

7

almost immediate with a button and a little delay via an automation on detecting row changes.

8

Add to Workflow breaking:

  1. Can’t have more than one Cross Doc sync for the same source table. It’s common to want to have several filtered cross doc’d tables from the same source table, often each of them looks at different subsets of the source table’s data (why not filter them all in with a more sophisticated formula? 1. you might need to bring in different columns for different lookups (e.g. including private data in one search but not another) 2. you might need to use the data from one of the sync’d tables to define the sync formula for the second sync’d table)
  2. When using a SetSyncFilter action to set Sync Filters, automaticall and implicitly apply a .Lower operation is applied to comparisons (which cannot be overriden in any way with the SetSyncFilter action). This is obviously an issue, because sometimes capitalization matters (e.g. in unique ids)
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