[MEGA TRICK] ⚡ User Scripts / Custom Actions

If Paul’s ingenious find helps turn the product team’s focus even a tiny bit to the increasingly neglected power users, then it’s a win in my book.

@Jason_Tamulonis : You could make our lives a lot easier if there was more willingness to expose some of these internal API functions as new or improved CFL action formulas. This is a an easy win as you can tuck away these formulas in an Advanced section of the Coda | Formulas page. The newcomers’ experience won’t be changed a bit, but us power users will finally stop pulling out whatever few hairs we have left.

Here’s a list off the top of my head, just to get the conversation going:

  • Formally support button() formula, allowing us to write actions directly in the formula and not need intermediary table buttons to run.

  • SaveToPDF(…)

  • Change Notify(people, message) to become : Notify(people, message, link), because the current behaviour defaults to the source table which is rarely what you actually want your end user to see. You can restrict link to be only a relative url within the doc if you must.

  • SubscribeToComments(row, person)

  • UnsubscribeFromComments(row, person)

  • row.Comments attribute: a full json object would be great , but heck even just a simple comment count as a start would be a big step forward

  • GetColumn(tableName, columnName): programmatically retrieve a table or column object by their name can help a lot in some complex formulas.

  • ShowColumn(view, column, position?) and HideColumn(view, column)

  • ShowPage(page) and HidePage(page) - or even better: “Hide IF” as an optional formula we can write for each page.

Finally, not strictly-speaking formulas but related minor improvements that don’t require a lot of effort and would go a long in simplifying our lives:

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