What was the most complicated thing you built in 2022 in Coda? + Mine

Question^

Long time enthusiast here, and I’m curious what other people came up with for their stuffs in 2022! The most complicated thing I built in 2022 in Coda was a MS SQL sync solution with Coda. There were 2 implementations:

The 1st one was a pseudo-DB-sync in Coda. Clicking on a button temporarily claims a new row from a MS SQL table, so for this I had to create an API & hook it up to a button in Coda using the studio pack. I’m doing this so I can use Coda as a GUI editor for many people at once. Claiming an object from the database changes the status field so it can’t be claimed anymore by a claim API request. It’s also called a pseudo-sync because the data is only temporarily stored in Coda for editing. When the row is finished editing in Coda, I have another API that pushes back the edited data to the database. I don’t really like this solution overall because I ended up having to use a sync-table in Coda which is a studio pack feature & it has a row limit of 10K only :frowning:

The 2nd implementation was a push to DB only solution. I can create and edit any row inside Coda and then push it to a database with a button at the row level. This one was a lot cleaner because there is no 10K row limit. Although after you’ve pushed a row to your DB it makes no sense to keep it inside of Coda.

Now, why go through all this hassle? Because I wanted to utilize a SQL database so I can push original data to it / query it post-processing, for large amounts of data at scale. This isn’t possible in Coda because there is a doc size limit for the coda APIs so you can’t use Coda as a true database solution.

In hindsight a custom web app could have been done instead but with Coda, you get a free fully fleshed out GUI table editor, doc editor (like collapsible headings, colors, stuff you can’t live without), Coda’s user friendly table language (this is useful for say calculating the total number of work items in WIP at a time for a given user- I’d hate to write this in actual code), web hosting, user provisioning, & user permissions.

Truly a wonderful confluence of technology Coda is!

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