Custom display feature

Making Packs
1

Right now the only way to add a way to display the data from the tables is through the embedding of outside content.

Are there any plans for the packs to be able to display custom output without embedding other pages? Or is it too difficult to implement without breaking sandboxing?

2

Thanks for raising this! Custom visualizations is something we talk about a lot, and it’s certainly something we’d like to enable in the long run. At the moment the best option is to return an inline SVG, but that’s obviously limited to the features of SVG. We have most of the components in place to allow Packs to generate their own embed code, but we need a couple more features to really make it feasible.

Can you give me an idea of what you’d do with this feature if it was made available?

1 Like
3

Thanks for the answer!

Honestly, right now I have no idea about what exactly I’d do, but I’ll share a few general ideas.

To preface, my interest in coda is primarily as a personal organizer tool. For now I’m using a spreadsheet to do that, but spreadsheets aren’t very good with automation. So I’ve searched for a long time for a no-code platform that might replace the spreadsheets for me and coda is the first one I’ve found that seems up to the task.

One of the advantages of spreadsheets I’m not quite ready to part with, though, is the ability to make my own UI layout. For example, some of my university homework has three deadlines with the maximum marks getting lower and lower. In my current spreadsheet, they’re arranged like this:

Screenshot 2022-03-21 205433
Screenshot 2022-03-21 2054331163×149 6.11 KB

Being able to recreate stuff like this would go a long way toward allowing me to migrate to using coda instead of spreadsheets.

I should note, however, that my perspective as a programmer who needs a customizable organizing tool is extremely niche and I’m not sure how helpful it would be.

Regardless, I’d like to express my deep admiration for your commitment to building a powerful and open extension API/SDK. Hearing about the stuff in the works for custom visualization and interaction is very reassuring in this regard.

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4

Thanks for following up, and the additional detail. For the time being I see two options to achieve something like this:

  1. Experiment with the display options of native Coda tables to see if you can replicate the visualization you want. Column grouping may allow you to get close enough.
  2. Create the visualization on an external service (Firebase hosting perhaps) and then embed it into your Coda doc. You’ll have to use the force: true option, which can also be done from within a Pack.

Hopefully in the future we’ll have an option to bundle this all into the Pack itself.

1 Like