Issue with Page Locking and Subtables – Advice Needed

[Sebastien]

Hi everyone,

I’m running into a limitation with Coda’s Page Locking settings and would love your insights or workarounds.

Context:
I want to allow users to interact with a subtable from a modal view, specifically to add and edit rows they’ve created. Think a DB Invoice table with a column pointing to DB Invoice Items table. I’d expect Coda to enable these interactions with the setting:

Page Locking → Interact only → Add, edit, and delete rows users created

Problem:
This setting works as expected, allowing users to interact with “standard” columns in modal view (expanded row). But not for a Relation column, shown as subtable in a modal: the “+” button disappears.

Users can’t add new rows to the subtable unless I unlock the page or switch to:

Page Locking Interact only → Edit any table value

But that second option is too permissive for my use case, with non-Coda savvy users. I need to protect sensitive fields, and I don’t want users to have full editing rights across the entire page – I already had users erroneously change e.g. the invoice number of a row from other users.

Tried workaround:

• I added a button to manually create a new row in the related table (DB Invoice Items). That part works, but the row is still not editable under the “Add, edit, and delete rows users created” setting — even though the row creator is the current user.
• I reached out to Coda support, and they confirmed this is currently working as intended. Their suggestion was to use the “Edit any table value” setting, but that unfortunately doesn’t meet the level of access control I need. Or Cross-Doc, which seems overblown.
• I could also duplicate every column to make a read-only version for sure, but that also seems overblown.

What I’m hoping for is:

• a way to allow users to add and edit their own rows in a subtable, without unlocking the entire page or enabling full edit rights.
• Or a workaround that respects the row-ownership logic of the locking system within subtables.

Has anyone run into this or figured out a workaround?
Would love to hear how you’re handling this.

Thanks in advance!
Sébastien

[anon1959570]

@Sebastien

Maybe use the table locking feature? (team& enterprise feature tho)

[Sebastien]

Hi Cristian,

thanks for your answer! In my understanding, Table Locking only “prevent[s] editors from adding, deleting, and configuring columns”. There are also Row restrictions, but disabling them that doesn’t seem to help: either all users or no user can edit values.

[Tyler_Maskiewicz]

@Sebastien - Just an idea, but it ain’t pretty. You could theoretically add a button on the line item rows (named something like “edit row”) that’s actually a hyperlink out to a separate unlocked page where just line items are displayed. It looks from my testing like the typically “open row” won’t work because it leaves you on the current page, but I literally copy pasted the URL of a row on the unlocked page to get a the URL coded something like: coda.io/doc/page#table/row&view=center. Removed the “&view=center” and I had it working from the locked invoice to get to the unlocked page with row in question.