[Feature Request] AddColumns() action (and RunActionsN())

[Paul_Danyliuk]

Hey!

Regarding AddColumns(), if you feel like you need that you must be doing something wrong. Coda is not spreadsheets, you don’t think of your tables as MxN matrices in Coda. Columns are not a dimension of data here — they are properties of records, which exist one per row. Think of Coda tables as if each row in Coda is a cell in Sheets that can hold not one but multiple values (multiple characteristics of a record).

What you most likely need is a table that would have MxN rows, a column to store the group value on M dimension, and a column to store the group value on N dimension. And a column to hold the value. If you disagree, please tell me what you’re trying to achieve.

Regarding RunActionsN(), there’s no need — you can implement it like this:

Sequence(1, N).FormulaMap(RunActions(
  action1,
  action2, ...
))

Also you may find this tutorial useful (the first ~10 minutes of the video):

Tutorial: Iterator tables (CurrentValue workaround)

After answering the CurrentValue issue questions so. many. times, I finally recorded the tutorial on a Coda data processing pattern I use as a workaround for this very problem. It involves creating single-row helper tables that store outer CurrentValue values into cells, so that they’re accessible in nested Filters and FormulaMap loops. I call this pattern Iterator tables, and beside being a workaround for CurrentValue, these are very powerful for doing more complicated calculations The video i…

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P.S. There is only one truly valid reason to want an MxN matrix in Coda: for copy-pasting it into existing Sheets that expect this kind of data orientation. Unfortunately there’s no good solution for that: you either need to update your sheets to accept a vertical table, or deal with the fact that you can only have a constant number of columns and spend quite some effort setting those up.