Hey @tomavatars one more thing here:
I noticed that in Roam when you have a relationship set up, it will kind of “open” the related item within the “originating” item and let you add to it right from there. This all gets picked up in the “destination” item, what’s more the context of the content coming from the “originating” item is maintained, very cool!
Here is a use of this I could see that is in fact I have been trying to accomplish in Coda:
If you are doing a Product Planning meeting and you want to establish that you are creating a product in the first place and some ideas come up in that meeting. You can record all this at the time on the new “Product Overview” page which you actually create for the first time in the meeting. This would be a row in Coda. In Roam, you’d bullet out the ideas. In Coda, if you have a subtable, you can add in the related rows. Then, later on, the doc can be expanded, but these added ideas are not in the meeting, so they don’t have the reference. That is something my team has really thought would be useful as you can the later see the ideas from the meeting and possibly better recall why they came about when deciding how to prioritize them.
I have in fact been trying to create a way to keep a “mutual” reference between two types of rows like this (Meeting and Idea in this example), and the way I was trying to accomplish this was through a “join table” as @Jean_Pierre_Traets you are describing here.
This is in fact a good solution, as I then plan to have subtables giving the full context I’m after in each of the joined tables. But setting this up has also been one of my largest challenges in Coda, especially as in each of my tables I’m using some hierarchy within the table: I have a “Project” table that has a few levels: “Project” at the highest, and also “Phase” which is a child of “Project.” So between the three tables, and hierarchies within the tables, it has been hard for me to get this working without a lot of work and help from the Coda team!
This may involve some complexities I’m missing here, but one thing that occurred to me that would make this simpler would be to allow “instant” relating via the “hovering data” that Coda provides when you mouse over a related row, what’s shown here:
If, when that data is displayed, you could actually jump in and add to it, and the row that you are in when you are adding this data was referenced, you would basically have a duplicate functionality as what Roam is offering, without the need to have a third “Join Table” to accomplish this.
As always hope I’m making sense and this is useful!