What are best practices for structuring your Cross-doc system?

[Tomislav_Mamic]

So, what goes to a separate doc? What are the criteria you use?

[Ed_Liveikis]

Although Codans have hinted that this is something that is being worked on, one of my main criteria is permissions, since docs cannot have permissions set granularly to pages within a doc. For example we separate out Interviews into a separate doc from our main Hiring doc, which contains more sensitive or valuable information. Thus those that are conducting interviews only have access to the data they need.

The other main criteria is separating concepts or responsibilities. In general we try to keep each doc focused on a particular goal or area. Given the flexibility of Coda this can result in blurred lines, but for example we have separate docs for Hiring, Deals, Contracts and Management. Each project gets its own doc, however these are for relatively small projects (3-5 people).

Another final criteria is performance, but this is harder to reason about.

[Paul_Danyliuk]

Hey! This answer still holds:

When to use a new "Doc" versus new "Pages"

Hey @David_Lawrence I guess what you mean by your question is this: If I want to add functionality X to my setup, should I do it in the same doc or in a separate one? There’s no definite answer to that, and best judgement applies based on many factors. Here are some of the most important ones: Access control. Do you need to restrict access to different parts of your system by different users/groups? (e.g. make the Task Management piece accessible to all, but Invoicing only to higher manage…

Also check out this recording of my lecture about cross-doc best practices:

[Lesson] Cross-Doc Best Practices

Another lecture today is about setting up Cross-doc in a proper way. The feature’s been around for over a year now but there are still some gotchas to know and issues to steer clear of. I’ve mentioned most of these all over my videos and streams but there hasn’t been a single compact video about everything Cross-doc in a single place. Well now there will be. It’s a stream starting in ~1h 20mins since publish time. Join to ask questions in the chat, or watch the replay later. [Cross-do…

[Tomislav_Mamic]

Thanks, I wasn’t aware that any viewer can copy a doc. That means I have to split some stuff into separate docs.

[Tomislav_Mamic]

Thanks! That makes it clearer!

[Paul_Danyliuk]

You can actually disable copy now, which should stop most of the bad actors. But the principle remains: the whole doc gets loaded into one’s browser, and with some tenacity it’s possible to extract all the data out of that doc. It’s encoded but any half-decend dev would immediately figure out how to decode it.

E.g. I used this simple script a while ago to check on what was taking space in some critical docs of my clients. Now it’s more complicated than that because of doc sharding, but doable just like that.