Page permissions to allow some to view confidential content and hide it from others

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Coda is such an amazing tool. To make it even more corporate-friendly, I think it’d be really great to have access/permission controls on the page/subpage level. We use it to create department hubs at my company, and while some information is viewable by all, it would be SO useful to hide some from the public and only give access to a number of people.

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Still relevant… We’re also thinking about these limitations. While they’re not dealbreakers, they do raise the question how much time and effort we should put into using Coda at a company / group level

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You can already achieve that by creating docs that only some people have access to and syncing them to your hub doc.

This will result in your hub having some pages from another doc where only a subset of people have access.

Launched: Sync page access control (view-only) - News from Coda - Coda Maker Community

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Pablo, thanks for the tip! I wasn’t aware sync pages have those access control options :slight_smile:

Moreover, after some tinkering I realised that Cross-doc also got some powerful features: Set up Cross-doc sync tables | Coda Help Center

Let me give you more context for my use case (maybe other people will find it useful):

  • My direct superior wants to do all note taking in Coda.
  • Some notes need to be visible for me, but other should be private (sensitive/confidential topics)
  • Both of us are Doc Makers
  • => We can’t actually use the same Coda table for all of our notes, as I would have the permission to change formulas, filters and breach confidentiality.

Workaround:

  1. My superior keeps 100% of his notes in a private Doc I don’t have access to
  2. He imports our common Notes database in his Private Notes doc via Cross-doc & enables two-way sync
  3. He creates a button in his Private Notes table that is active for the shareable Notes and that creates a copy of that row row in our Common Notes

Am I missing something or doing some over-engineering?
I’d love to hear what you think of this.

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Hi Alex,

That’s an interesting use-case and your solution is a good idea, but I think you can simplify it a bit.

I have not tested this, so I’m not 100% sure it will work, but you could try this:

  • Your boss hosts the notes database in his private doc
  • Each note has a category, but it defaults to ‘Confidential’ upon creation.
  • You enable Cross-Doc to a common doc with 2-way sync activated only for notes that are not ‘Confidential’

In this way your boss would create notes on his doc, and whenever he wants to make something public he would just have to change the category. I think you should be able to create notes in the common doc while not being able to see any of the confidential notes, since you don’t have access to the private doc.

And of course you keep everything on a single table.

Hope this helps,

Pablo

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Hey Pablo,

That was my initial thought as well, but wouldn’t I be able to modify the Cross-doc sync settings in the common doc to also include the confidential category?

The goal is to eliminate any confidentiality concern :thinking: without any shadow of a doubt :busts_in_silhouette: :grin:

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To be honest, I have never been in a workspace with more than one doc maker :sweat_smile: I assumed that if a database is in a private doc only the doc owner would be able to set up and change the configuration of the cross doc, but I have no way of testing it. Maybe someone else will chime in and throw some light into the topic.