User specific document creation

1

Hello,

I’m new to Coda, and i want to make sure the use-case below can be done using Coda,

I would like to create a standard coda document to be filled by +300 sales representatives( many tabels to fill), the aim is that each respondent would have his own private document to update daily without the ability to see other people’s documents and at the end of each day, an automation process will gather all responses and generate a report

Do you think Coda is the right tool to do that ? i’m thinking to create a template and use the api to duplicate it 300 times with the right privacy settings and send invites to the users, wdyt ?

Thank you

2

Hey @Anass_BEn, welcome to the community!

It’s not impossible but depending on what you need it can be very tedious and tricky. If a client approached me to build this kind of setup, I’d most likely suggest some other solution.

Here’s what you can do pretty easily:

  1. Make a template doc
  2. Copy it with an API
  3. Have unified code to iterate over those docs and read the data, since all table and column IDs remain equal across copied docs

Here’s what you cannot do (to the best of my knowledge):

  1. Automate setting access permissions on each individual doc (i.e. share each doc with a corresponding person). You’ll have to do that manually for all 300+ editors.
  2. Propagate any structural changes from your template doc to each of the individual docs. I.e., if at some point you decide to add a column, you cannot do that. You’ll have to clone and set up all 300+ docs again, and migrate data from the obsolete 300+ docs into the new ones.

If you don’t require the UX of Coda to collect that data, I’d advise look into solutions that allow data entry within a single destination (single doc, single form, single Airtable base etc) and provide real access control on row level.

Also, quite possible that you don’t really need this sort of access separation, and e.g. it’s okay if all 300+ people edit the same doc and just have others’ data filtered from each other. This isn’t real security and there are ways to read filtered data. But if this is not really that much of a concern, then at the moment this would be the best way to go along if you choose to go along with Coda.

1 Like