Been working for Coda for a year and have done some amazing things. But I continue to struggle getting the fundamental logic on the two-way end. Here is a very simple use-case below
I have a company CRM. In the company table I say the company is low priority. Now I go to a meeting and take meeting notes which are listed in the notes table. During the meeting I learn some new things and realize, wow, an amazing company so I want to update the company to high priority form within the meeting notes form and layout. In my mind, a two-way edit means I should be able to do this but actually this simple question continues to confuse me why it doesn’t work properly.
I know I can open up the company row from the notes table but this is a different approach.
Grateful if some one can explain this simple. Others have also asked this with no clear answer
I have to admit that the inner workings of the two-way-crossdoc-table synchronization mechanism have defeated me, also.
Whenever I think I understand how it ‘should’ work and build a solution based on that understanding, I find it does not work as expected.
Perhaps we need somebody to publish a beginner’s guide to two-way sync use patterns?
(@Eric_Koleda, @Scott_Weir2 ?)
In the meantime, I have resorted to a more “brute force and ignorance” mechanism.
I use webhooks to send the changes from one document to another.
Not elegant. And defeats the whole idea of having a table as the central paradigm for our logic.
But it has the following attributes that we rely upon.
It is instantaneous (ish), so the users do not see stale data
It is atomic. We package a single set of changes to a single row into a one-shot event.
It is a genuine symmetric solution (if implemented correctly) - behaves the same in both directions
we keep an audit log of all exchanges - each webhook saves it payload into a log table
But I cannot commend it to the beginner.
You take on full responsibility for the exact functioning of the two-way updates.
And that means maintaining any changes over the lifetime of the application.
@Max_OBrien - I think @Chris_DeAngelis is just talking about normal Coda table behvior here, not the “two-way sync” feature of Cross doc and other Packs.
@Chris_DeAngelis - Unfortunately columns created using formulas or calculations are not editable, and you do need to go back to the source record to edit it there. In some cases you can create shortcuts, like adding a button to the meeting notes table that when pressed updates the status of the associated company, but that isn’t a general purpose solution.
Well at least I am not crazy. I think part of the issue here is that two-way editing is misleading. @Max_OBrien so glad others, get the confusion here.
Two-way editing is a special option of sync tables. It’s about enabling updating data from a synced table in one document back to the master table in a different document.
If you google ‘Two-way editing coda’ and take a look at the documentation, it’s all about Cross-docs and sync tables. Don’t see anything missleading about that.
The issue that you described belongs to basic tables. Max is certainly not confused about those. The rule is very easy to understand, as Eric said: ‘Calculated/formula columns cannot be edited’.
➤𝖒𝖆𝖝