How to pass information to a duplicated page

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Basically, this is my workaround for not being able to manipulate pages like rows. Coupled with the thisPage hack I can get the basic functionality I want, but it’s kind of backward.

I’m using this for a meeting notes doc. I want to be able to make a page that is related to a row in a table. This way I can store information about that page in the table, or look up information from other tables related to this page and display it on the page.

For example, my Meeting History table contains all the meetings that have happened and a link to their page. It looks up the Meeting Rating that took place on the date of this meeting and displays it next to the Meeting Duration and the link to the Meeting Page.

The Meeting Page itself will look up the tasks created in the previous meeting, as well as run other formulas. I’ll also make notes in the page and add tables as I need them.

In my ideal world, the content of the page is controlled by the columns of its parent table. This way, when I change a formula in the parent table it updates all prior meeting pages.

This is important because if a template has an error and I duplicate it a couple of times before catching the error, I have to go back to each of those duplicated pages and fix the bug manually. What I want is a master parent table that has all the formulas within it, then the page can just look those up with much simpler formulas.

For example, in my parent table (in this case the [Meeting History] table) I might have a column like [Unfinished Tasks Due This Meeting]. Its formula might look like:

[Tasks].Filter([Done].Not() AND [Due] <= thisRow.[Meeting Date])

Then in the page associated with that row, I might have a table called [Tasks Due], it would be a view of [Tasks] but its filter function would be really simple:

thisPage.[Unfinished Tasks Due This Meeting].Contains(thisRow)

This way, if ever there is an error with my formula [Unfinished Tasks Due This Meeting], I can update it in one place. After all, I want all meeting pages to be the same except for the ad hoc information I may add in like templates with the slash command, tables, or notes.

So, the hierarchy becomes:

  1. The parent table, which does all the heavy lifting with fancy formulas
  2. The page, which can reference its row in the parent table (with thisPage) and look up the fancy formulas the parent table performs
  3. The views of template page, which is duplicated by the parent table whenever a new meeting page is needed

The only reason I’m currently trying to pass information into the duplicated page is so that the page can know where it came from. If I pass a uuid to it then it can look itself up in the parent table. Right now, that ‘uuid’ is the date. If the page had a built in thisPage function, I wouldn’t need to pass information to the page, it could look it up itself.

If this doesn’t make sense, please let me show you my meeting notes doc over a 20 minute zoom meeting. I super highly respect your design philosophy, so I’m not trying to impose my will, but I really want to ensure the pain points I’ve faced with trying to create templated pages can be avoided for myself and others.

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