Granular Permissions

@jakobheuser and others — now that we have custom packs, I’ve built one for granular permissions on cross-doc tables. It’s not granular permissions on pages but it will enable most of those scenarios already!

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Its kinda disappointing this has not been yet solved after such a long time, its one of the features that will improve usability of Coda (and simplify many docs, eliminating need for cross-doc which is really a bad solution for this problem in many cases) many times and make it viable for many more use cases…

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Just adding another bump for granular permissions.

I am not a software developer, but still have some inkling of how technically difficult it would be to implement granular permissions in Coda, given its power and flexibility, and the need to ensure docs are performant even with thousands upon thousands of rows. It would not surprise me to be told that permissions are a lot easier to implement for Airtable and Notion precisely because they lack some of the power and flexibility of Coda.

So, this is not a complaint, just adding another voice to the ‘signal’ from the userbase that granular permissions are a (the?) top priority for many Coda makers. God speed Codans, we’re counting on you! :laughing:

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I would also like to add another request in this area. I’ve been wanting to make a published doc that only shows data to users that the user is allowed to see. There are two problems

  1. Someone can do @ and see any row in the doc and every person in the doc along with their emails
  2. I can’t just cross doc data from another doc because users need to easily edit. On top of this I need to filter using the User() formula (so that the current user only sees their rows) which does not work over cross doc
    Fixing one of these issues would solve the problem for me, but at the moment, they are significant security problems for what I’m trying to do
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More granular permissions would be nice.

Do you think it would work to use access permissions this way?

Another big vote for granular permissions.

Thoughts on implementation as follows:

  • For pages - edit and/or viewing access controls per page. RE the Codan’s comment above, if elements of that page (tables, formulas) are reference elsewhere that’s fine, the edit/view controls are specific to that page and granted for each user in the doc).

  • For tables - edit access per column/field (Airtable does this quite well, you mentioned other products taking shortcuts, what does that mean in this case? Presumably the edit access per column is on the master version of the table, which would thus be implemented like Airtable did correct?)

I have recently moved from most of my work from Airtable given the immense power and flexibility of Coda, by which I really am incredibly impressed and stoked about!
These granular permissions would really be the icing on the cake of an excellent product!

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Sharing document will be helpful. It help others to know more about it.

Granular permission is absolutely a much needed feature, Any update on this?

This is one of my most difficult challenges when implementing for my clients, especially those who concern about permission and security.

Hi @Anthony_Thong_Do

What is it exactly that your clients are missing?

Cheers, christiaan

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Christiaan, I do understand the difficulties to implement granular permissions for coda due to the functionalities of the platform.

However, may I suggest just giving us the ability to hide certain pages from certain people. Fully unreachable… not like right now. That would already make a world of difference and have little technical complications I presume.

hi @Miguel_de_Rojas , welcome to the community

I am not working for Coda, only with the software, so my opinion is as much worth as yours.
However I believe that the solution you desire is indeed something Coda is working on. As you may have read in other parts, the company is not sharing anything related to their roadmap (if they have any at all), so we don’t know for sure.

Cheers, Christiaan

What is the latest update on this? Is it still something that is being worked on?

hi @Meagan_Groenendijk , it has been a while since we got feedback from Coda.

In general I would say that people with access to a doc have access to all info in a doc. If you want to make some info available to some people, you need to generate a new doc and link it to the source doc for specific data sets. I use webhooks and my own webhook pack (for free) to make this work, however I believe it should be solved by Coda natively and not by any third party pack.

Cheers, Christiaan

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This is definitely a pain. My problem too is everyone being able to see each other. The work-around you’ve found is create the views right?

you can filter on users and thus show per user what you want to show, but most users in the doc will learn how to see the information by (temp) removing the filter on the table.

Again in a doc the leading principle is that everything is visible for everyone and so far Coda did not show anything indicating that they want to solve this issue.

Sorry to bring you the bad news, but this is it.

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This limitation stinks, but I guess I still land on Coda though for the “best” solution. Airtable gives you the granular permission, but you are paying for client users, plus you don’t have the doc features. You can do something custom, but then you have the expense of development and maintenance. There are options like Softr but you still have a steep learning curve, no native mobile app, and still need someone to maintain it. You agree?

Hi everyone, I have posted a new suggestion which might be helpful for some of you that also look for page (and possibly also block) visibility permissions: Page and Block Visibility Formula

I came from AT years ago and their speed is impressive, but I needed text and numbers so it became Coda. The permission logic you can solve with a webhook pack see below:

It is some work, not complicated.

Cheers,