How do you create a button in a cross-doc that is utilizing hidden columns in the formula?

I’m creating a community directory and I’ve set up a master table that contains all the details about a person (including private demographic information) - this table is populated via a coda form connected to the table, which is filled out by community members.

My goal is to create a cross-doc on a published page that pulls in SOME of the information in the master table, but I’d like to do it in a more visually appealing way through the use of buttons (example: instead of a twitter, linkedin, or email long-form link, I’d like to create a button). However, when I hide the column that the button formula is pulling from (example: LinkedIn Link coulmn), the button becomes inactive.

Am I doing something wrong here? Is there a fix for this? Or must I use the ugly links instead of the cute buttons? :sob:

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

This all sounds like a great use of Cross-doc and the idea is totally right. You are getting caught by something that is part of what makes Cross-doc a secure way to share only some information while omitting other information.

Cross-doc uses “scoped tokens” with the API setup, This means that the permissions that the connection makes is only for the table specified and only for the information displayed. If a column is hidden, Cross-doc doesn’t bring that data over at all. It’s not reachable by formula and it doesn’t even show up if you craftily use developer tools to look for it in the Coda doc files themselves. So this is a great feature for security, but causes some confusion for setups like you’re mentioning here.

The way to go for here is to bring over the button and the link column with the sync table. You may want to create a view of the table on another page in the core doc so you can keep all needed columns visible without it affecting the views that are regularly used. When you bring over all needed columns to the sync doc, you can then hide those link columns in the sync table and the buttons will still be able to use the link info. That keeps your display as you want it and keeps the link columns reachable.

I think I read your setup properly, but if I’m off, don’t hesitate to correct me and we can keep working through specifics.

Thank you Ben,

Appreciate your quick response! However, I’m not seeing the result I’m looking for.

As you suggested, I took the “view” approach. In the public facing document, I created one hidden page which pulled in (via cross-doc) all the columns that are used in the button formulas. Then I created a non-hidden page with a view of the hidden pages cross-doc table and I hide the coulmns used for the formula. But the buttons are still inactive.

The buttons are even inactive on the page that does have the columns used in the formula. See image.

Hey Ben, I’ve created a test doc link here: Cross-Doc Scenario Test - Public Doc

This outlines my challange. Note that my doc is not “Published” and thus discoverable, but rather shared. Not sure if that makes a difference.

FYI: I exchanged some message with Coda support via their chat-bot. At the moment, if you want non-logged in members to be able to use buttons that click a hyperlink, you are required to publish the doc, confirm that all the pages in your doc have the right locking settings turned on for each page (in the case of this directory, “interact only” with everything turned off accept “Use buttons, controls, and forms”), and put it in play-mode in order for the buttons to work.

I have not found a way to pull in the buttons from the main-table using cross-docs, so you do need to re-create the buttons in the cross-doc itself. Hope this is helpful to someone out there! (And to the Coda team!)

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