Set card height for rack elevation drawing

I’m using a Coda table to document all the hardware components in a server rack. It works well because I can have lookup columns and reference items from other pages, etc. I would love to be able to draw the rack elevation diagram within Coda, so I don’t have to switch to another tool for that (such as Vizio, Wirecad, etc.) and lose all the nice data references.

In my imagination, the most basic implementation could work like this: Add an option in the “card display” settings called “card height”. This would default to Auto, but you can choose any of the number-type columns in the table. So I have a number-type column called RU which drives the visual display of each card.

I’ve created a sample document to show my best attempt at making this with the existing tools. On the second page card view, I use a filter to include only rows which have a value for “rack position” and I also sort by this field. I group it by “location” on top to separate each rack.

If this feature is useful to others, it could be built out with more features like traditional rack drawing programs. (e.g. data validation to avoid duplicates, automatic calculation of position numbers when rearranging, half-width devices, etc.)

Hi Elliott!

@BenLee shared a Wedding Planning doc internally that uses the rectangle formula, with a slider to adjust the card size.

Screen Recording 2021-10-05 at 10.51.48 AM

I copied and added to your doc, with a table using the slider and another using the RU column. You can change the formula to show a different color or a size multiplier larger than 2x.

Let us know if you have any questions!

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