Need the api to watch for changes in a doc / row.
We can currently watch for changes adding a new doc or row but not when a row is updated.
Please add this.
Hey @Juanmata, thanks for the suggestion! We had a number of other users request triggers/webhooks in the API, and it’s on our list.
In the meantime, if you’re using Zapier, I would recommend setting up an automation that listens to row updates and inserts a row into another table. You can then watch for new rows coming in on that table.
Hi @oleg
I appreciate you getting back to me.
I can’t fault how quick you guys get back to us and although we get updates often, they’re for relativly simple stuff. I agree some make it more appealing to look at or use but I feel the big requests we want falls on deaf ears.
I’m on the edge of jumping ship right now and I can’t help mention that I have been looking for an alternative to Coda but i’ve put so much work into Coda I can’t bring myself to leave and I really do want this to be a success.
It’s just unusable on a daily basis for me and many others and I can’t help wonder why many requests take so long to implement while others get implemented.
First off, you add a print button but have you actually tried to print something, it’s awful!
Try to print a table or a doc on an A4 piece of paper and tell me this is how you vision it, it’s so messed up that you couldn’t possibly use it.
You need to be able to set a print area just like in excel, surly this should have been one of the first things to implement?
Secondly, you have an API that does many wonderful stuff but it doesn’t watch for changes in a row? Again this should have been the first thing added along with watching for a new doc or new row.
I know it’s hard for a developer to implement everything so quickly but I’ve looked back at request from a very long time ago that still haven’t been added so I can’t help but feel we need a better system.
Maybe in this community, have a pole for feature requests where us users can vote for what’s more important to us, you then know what to implement first. If a new request is submitted, it automatically adds to the pole.
This might not be something you can add quickly so I have created a Facebook page where us users can request a feature using a pole as well as having a community on there.
Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/533591640771383/
I can understand it looks like we’re simply ignoring certain feature requests, but we’re not, and we have them all logged. At the end of the day, Coda has gotten quite complex and we have a huge backlog of feature requests, improvements, and bugs to address, and a limited amount of people to take care of them. Then there are major features we’ve worked on (e.g., workspaces, locking, Packs sync tables recently) lots of users have been requesting for years, including from many of our customers not active on the community. Add to that large amounts of work under the hood (infrastructure, security, pricing, compliance certification, etc.) we need to take care of, so we just can’t get around to everything at once.
Obviously improved printing and triggers for APIs are important for you and a significant subset of other users, but this work just hasn’t surfaced to the top of our queue just yet. The good news is as a company we’re still growing and hiring more employees, so over time we’re going to increase the number of features and fixes we can whip out. 
With respect to printing, in my experience it works reasonably well so long as your table fits on one page. So, one workaround I can recommend is to create a new view with only the columns you want to fix on your page, and hide the others. When you go to print, only print the page range that you need. This is until we get around to something like a print range feature. By the way, it would be great feedback for us if you have suggestions on how to deal with large grouped tables or large tables that won’t fit on a page. What should happen, other than content getting cut off?
As for an API for watching changes to a doc, it’s actually quite a big amount of work for the ~10 or so users who’ve requested it, which is why we haven’t gotten to it yet. The way we’d implement this is with webhooks, where you’d register one of your URLs to get called by Coda whenever a change happens. But we need to build out management for these URLs, add retry logic, guard against abuse (e.g., someone registering an endpoint they don’t own and have Coda spam it), etc., which can take weeks to do right at our scale. As I suggested earlier, you can either build a tool yourself that periodically looks for changes to a table (fetch all the rows and look where the modified date is greater than the last fetch date), or use Zapier which automatically does something like that for you.
Lastly, we’re actively looking into a polling/voting feature. I think Discourse (what we use for this community) might have a plugin, which would be great so we don’t need a new site. Facebook isn’t ideal longer term since not everyone uses it. Let us know if you have any suggestions!
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I appreciate all the hard work you guys put in but asking for money at this stage has made me find an alternative as Coda just doesn’t deliver.
I will keep testing and playing about with it but for now I’ll keep a free account as these api and printing issues stop me using it for work and at this point in time, Coda is a passion, not a piece of software that I can use in the real world.
Just looking at Zapier, how do you setup an automation to listen for updates to a row?
This is exactly what I am trying to do in Intergromat. I’ve opened Zapier and it appears I can only watch for new rows.
Zapier doesn’t support watching for updates to a row. You need to set up an automation in Coda to add a new row into a new table whenever a change is made, and then you can listen to new rows using Zapier.