Automating updates at a future point in time

Hi All,

I am fairly new to these parts. I was just wondering if there was a way to setup a forwarded dated change. I have everything linked back to one data source and have just created various views to filter out the information not required for certain things.

What I need is a way to change one condition but at a point in time. For example, all of February I want to see that the sky is blue across every view that we have. But then change it from 1 March to be that the sky is purple without having to manually keep a reminder to go back in and change the colour of the sky myself on 1 March.

Does anyone know of a way to set this up or have they done anything like this before?

Hi Kristelle,

Welcome to Coda!

Could you be a little more specific as to what you are looking for? Do you want entries in table updated? Or do you want the filters on views to be updated? Or is it something else?

Regards
Piet

Hi Piet,

It would be the main data source where things are updated. This would then reflect in the filtered views (if they are set to show the condition). I assume this is a correct assumption?

I am after changing one condition at a future point in time. This would be on cell in the main data source. As with the example, for the main data sources I track colours (blue, green, purple) of things (sky, grass, tree). I want to show for all of February that the sky is blue. However, I want to know if its possible to set a change during February (say on the 15th) to take affect from 1 March for the cell on the colour of the sky to change from blue to purple, without me having to log back in to manually do this.

Any assistance or ideas on how to complete this would be very appreciated.

Regards,
Kristelle.

I assume the following

You have a column colThings, and another that is colThingColor.
In colThingColor, you want to show

  • if colThing = sky and today() < 1 March then blue, else purple
  • if colThing = tree and today() < 1 March then brown, else green

I am a little short of time, but you should be able to implement that in the colThingColor using SwitchIf() formula.

Regards

Hi Piet,

I should be able to adapt that into our current setup and this should work in the context needed.

Thankyou so very much for your assistance on this one.

Regards,
Kristelle.

1 Like

If you had more complex needs (for example changing the colour every month, rather than just once), or need to re-use this logic in a number of different places or different columns, you could also create another table to manage the different dates and states.

  • Your new table would be called ColorIndex
  • You would have columns StartDate, EndDate, ThingType, Color, Active
  • You would add a row for each span of time that you wanted a certain thing to be a certain colour
  • You would set this formula on the Active column: Today() >= StartDate AND Today() <= EndDate

And then in colThingColor, your formula would be
ColorIndex.Filter(ThingType = colThing AND Active = True).First().Color

(The “First()” in there is because you might inadvertently set overlapping dates and have multiple colors active, and you only want to grab one result; this grabs the first result)