Cross Doc Syncing Columns

Hi,

I’m getting extremely frustrated by working with the Cross Doc feature.

I dealed with the fact that there is no granular permission system is Coda, so decided to start working with Cross Docs. But these have SERIOUS limitations.

Some pains I can deal with:

  • Cross docs of different views of the same table -> whenever you change something in one synced table, you have to sync the next table to see the changes
  • Syncing speed -> It takes 5-10s for a table to sync, that’s insane. I have one of the highest speed internet connections in the world (Bulgaria), so that’s not the reason.

Something I’m really getting frustrated about:

Column syncing. Why is it not possible to sync a column when you add it to the view that is “Cross-doc”-ed?
It’s a huge pain in the ass. I’ve had many times that I didn’t notice that a certain column was needed in my cross-doc because buttons won’t work anymore because of the Cross Doc push button button.

All good, but when I then want to add that column to specify certain filters or disabling features on the button in the Cross Doc table after the fact, I have to delete all my work (and the columns I added to the Cross Doc table) and restart again after syncing the table.

This has made me lose hours if not days.

I now know of this and try to think it through as much as possible, but it keeps happening and it makes me become very frustrated with my beloved Coda.

Any tips to avoid this would be greatly appreciated as I’ve read that Granular Permissions aren’t in the pipeline for Coda development.

Thank you,
Sonny

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Hey Sonny, sorry to hear about the frustration with cross-doc!

When you add a new column to your source table, it won’t show up by default in your synced table. But you should be able to include the new column once you sync, either from the row column (see gif) or by adding a new column with the formula [Row].[New column name]:

Is that what you’re looking for? Let me know if that’s not quite what you’re after!

2 Likes

Omg Hannah, I feel so stupid right now.
This is indeed what I was looking for and wasting my time on…

Thank you for the swift reply.

No worries! It’s a bit hidden, you’ve definitely highlighted that we need better help documentation around this so thank you for bringing it up.

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Definitely hidden and definitely not a sensible solution. If a sheet is synced, then a sheet should be synced, having pieces of it hidden is not intuitice. I just spent two hours trying to figure this out myself, even upgraded my plan to see if it was the plan limitation, only to find this post.
You need to add some notification somewhere. Perhaps in the ‘column’ section of the table…why not have a section called ‘Hidden in Other Views’ and LIST the views! or at a minimum, list the columns that are hidden from other anonymous views, so one could deduce that the issue is a column being hidden and not ‘not syncing’.
Put it under the hidden column, my suggestion.
image
Or a notification should pop up somewhere announcing that you’re about to add something that is hidden from your other ‘synced’ tables.
Thanks.