Recover from "broken" update row reference

Making Packs
1

There’s a known limitation in Coda that row references can only work in sync tables, so when a formula returns an updated row, any row reference fields become broken, and that breaks any filters that rely on that field (related issue and documentation).

I found a way to deal with this, but wondering if there’s a better approach.

Currently, I found that there’s a way to get the id from the reference field by doing ParseJSON. The challenge is that it returns an error for when it encounters a non-JSON input. So, I have another field that gets the id through a reference - this one errors out when it’s not a reference. Then a third field merges both with SwitchIf, and finally contains the id. Then finally, the last field is the actual object I want to reference, but found with Filter(...) that matched by an id.

1 Like
2

Wow, what a creative approach! We’re working to make it so that action formulas (and others) can use references, but it’s proven challenging as it relies on completing some other infrastructure work first.

1 Like
3

Thanks @Eric_Koleda … Hopefully, it would be solved soon.
This is a pretty hacky workaround and probably not performant due to the use of Filter to find the reference, but it would have been made better if the “broken” reference field could still be accessed as a normal object (instead of parsing JSON), and if there was some way to handle errors inside formulas (instead of relying on columns to “swallow” the error in order to use the result in other formulas). Maybe, those two are easier fixes to do in the short-term?