Page references and relation column display name

1

Page references in a display name get displayed as the page ID in relation columns that reference that table. For example:

If you have a row in a table like this:
image

And there’s a table that has a relation column to that table, that row will be displayed with the page Id.
image

Anyway to work around this so perhaps the reference column display says “This is text with a page reference Thurs 6/6/24”?

2

Hey @Ryan_Hubbard,

Great question. Currently we have the PageName() formula that can get the name of a page a table or object is on. One of the currently challenges is that when you pull that name from a reference, you’ll still have the issues where the editable reference column just shows an id.

Because of this we’ve generally recommended users manually enter page names as text in the display column and store the page link/reference in a separate column, allowing you to formulaically pull up that data when you need to.

Hopefully that helps a little! If not please feel free to reach out to us on the support team, by clicking the " ? " in the bottom right-hand side of your doc.

All my best,
Dan

3

Thanks @Dan_Demers . Yeah unfortunately I don’t believe this solves the issues:

  1. Users naturally use page references when they’re writing text. Teaching every user never to use a page reference in a column because coda will translate that to an ID on a lookup is futile and not intuitive.

  2. The other user case if you have to store the page name manually, it’s static, and won’t update if someone changes the page name and they get out of sync.

I would love if Coda could someday expand on some of the programming capabilities:

  1. Get page name on the page canvas without referencing an object
  2. Translating page references to the page name in lookups, or when using ToText()
4

Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention and understand how the workaround isn’t ideal and solve your issues. Due to the page reference limitation at this time, I can’t think of any other workarounds. Thanks for understanding.

I’ll make sure to add a feature request for improved capabilities you’ve outlined. Appreciate the feedback!

5

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