😬 What was hard for you to discover in Coda?

[Paul_Danyliuk]

I have a feeling it’s a recent change introduced with this patch:

Improvements to Calculation Performance

We meant it when we said we’re committed to improvements for doc performance! We’ll continue to share updates on our progress in this space as they roll out so that you, our valued makers, know where to expect improvements. In the past few weeks we’ve made over a dozen improvements focused on doc calculations. Among these updates: Instantly expand rows via activate action. We have updated our infrastructure to allow the Activate(thisRow) action to run without getting blocked behind calculati…

because this one hints at how Coda changes the behavior of actions to be non-blocking in certain scenarios.

Or it could be a change introduced along WithName(), although I don’t remember any regressions in this regard at the moment.

Fact: I don’t remember having any problems with omitting RunActions() in a FormulaMap before. I only noticed it now. I was doing quite a lot of client work and I used to omit RunActions() quite often. So I assume that if this behavior existed before February, I would have caught it already. I had a pause in consulting since February, and I only caught it now. I also caught a few bugs around using CurrentValue and WithName in FormulaMap/RunActions.

That’s why I’m concerned in the first place. What if this is a recent change indeed and many of my old clients’ docs are now broken?

Other than this, there’s evidence of RunActions() forcing sequential behavior back in 2019:

Several actions for button

That’s correct. This was a change we made before launching buttons and automations (https://blog.coda.io/new-building-block-automation-811a4d604f91) because of feedback on this (like @Daniel_Stieber’s above) – actions are run sequentially now.

There’s no evidence that lack of RunActions() used to run non-sequentially though.

@cnr

Remember, it used to be that you could only add the RunActions at the beginning of your formula, you couldn’t include it inside of your loop iirc

Never heard of this; I never doubted that I could use RunActions anywhere, it never gave me any errors. FWIW I joined Coda in Mar 2019; maybe it was different before that.

Interesting fact: a button would always implicitly wrap your whole action in RunActions() even if it’s just one action that you’re running. You can inspect that by “merge()-ing” the button and seeing its pending evaluation formula.