`Embed` and `Image` formulas don't work in `Concatenate` formulas

[Connor_McCormick]

Hi all! Thank you all so much for the detailed responses. I will respond to all with one post here and I will update the original post to reflect some of the necessary details.

The Goal

My goal with the use of the combination of the Concatenate and Image formula is to autogenerate a section of text based on the contents of several tables.

You can see my writeup of my design goals here with a sample doc that demonstrates what I want:

How best to generate text (a document) from a table?

Hello everyone, My current goal is to use Coda to automate the creation of Scope of Work documents. For each of my prospective customers I want to: Input information about them into tables Select a particular customer to populate a Section that contains their scope of work which should contain: a. One off items like their name, the date, and my contact information b. FormulaMap generated items. For example, a customer may have multiple security locations, and each location may require mult…

As well as the constraints I ran into when I tried to implement the doc in this subsequent post:

How best to generate text (a document) from a table?

Ok! I learned a lot about trying to generate sections dynamically. Most of it has to do with getting over some of the current shortcomings of Coda. As usual, we know how hard they are working and that they are likely to address this in the near future. This is for those that would like to see what pitfalls and limitations exist for document generation when attempting a pure Coda approach. This is a long post, so if you’d like to just play with the doc you can find it here: Learnings: Newlin…

What inspired this revisitation is that Coda now supports printing docs and I have a lot of scopes to write and I’m tired of doing them manually.

Here’s the full formula that I’m using to generate my section of text. I’m sure you can see what it’s doing and why the Concatenate function has to be mixed with Image functions. This image formatting problem also happens with the Format function.

@Connor_McCormick

FormulaMap(Summary, Concatenate(Format("{1}                                                                                                                                                                                                           
", CurrentValue.Name), FormulaMap(CurrentValue.Locations, Format("{1}
{2}
{3}  

   
", CurrentValue.Name, If(CurrentValue.[Image URL].IsBlank(), ' ', Image(CurrentValue.[Image URL], 800, 600)),
Concatenate(
Format("The intended installations are:
{1}
", CurrentValue.Devices.Name.FormulaMap(ToText(CurrentValue)).BulletedList()),

FormulaMap(CurrentValue.Devices, 
Concatenate(Format("
{1}
{2}
", CurrentValue.Name, Concatenate(If(CurrentValue.[Image URL].IsNotBlank(), Image(CurrentValue.[Image URL].ToText(), 800, 600), ""),
Format("
{1}
    Service Type: {2}
    Color: {3}
",[Output Formatting].Details.First(), CurrentValue.[Service Type].ToText(),
CurrentValue.Color.ToText())))))
)))))

Constraining Tables

Unfortunately, @Paul_Danyliuk, this means that your constraining table solution won’t work for me as I cannot put views of tables in a dynamic formula like this. I will have a variable number of images depending on the contents of my tables (though that is a genius solution in other contexts).

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@Shane_Robinson Thank you for your response. The squarespace images I used were just examples. I’m not using them in my real doc. Sorry for the confusion there and thank you for your investigation of the API.

@Shane_Robinson

I can […] whip up an example in your Doc if you’re interested in how that would work.

Would still be interested in seeing this nonetheless, even if you’d just like to share your test doc.