Invoke custom function upon saving record

Baserow Help
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Hi all,

First of all, you have created an awesome product.

With regards to creating an object, I have a question wheter it is possible to invoke a custom function upon saving.

I know in Django, it is possible to overwrite the save method. But I was wondering how to achieve this in baserow, given the models are created dynamically.

(See e.g. Overriding the save method - Django Models - GeeksforGeeks)

In Django I use this for example to invoke a custom function, to translate adress to lat/lon and store these values.

It might also be, that I run a script and need to store the values in a different table (e.g. calculate a route with above values).

I was tinkering with baserow, and in the specific case of these lat/lon I can imagine a custom field or function could do the trick.

In essence, my question is what would be the best approach to invoke a custom function after saving an entry (and populate other fields, or even create an entry in an other table)?

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Hi,

It depends on your case. If you want to calculate a link to a map based on a lat/long pair, you can do this with a formula field. For example:

link(concat('https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/', field('Latitude'),'/',field('Longitude')))

In more complex scenario’s where you want to add rows in other tables based on certain input values, I would recommend using an automation service. There are some good tutorials on how you can integrate with n8n, Zapier or Make.

Regards
Frederik

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No, basically I want to trigger a function.

In this example, pass street/city/country to a function, which returns the lat/lon, allowing Django to save them in the respective columns.

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@Berik we offer the ability for technical users to make plugins which would let you do exactly this. I made an example geo spatial plugin that enables PostGIS and adds a “Point (lat/lng)” field type to Baserow last year which can be seen here: Nigel Gott / baserow_geo_plugin · GitLab which might be a good starting point. Our plugin docs are here: https://baserow.io/docs/plugins%2Fintroduction/ .

2 Likes
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Thanks. Ill try to install that one and go from there.

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@Berik FYI that is an example plugin that hasn’t been updated for a year, it might work out of the box, it might need fixing up first. The implementation was also very bare bones just to show how it could work.

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Thanks. Ill just play around with it a bit, and with plugins in general.

I’m reasonably proficient with Django, so just need to get (really) familiar with baserow.

Have different ideas in mind I would like to tackle with baserow, given I like the concept of the dynamic models very much, as well as the integrated django-rest availability.

Though what I need from baserow is quite different from it’s intend, I think it suits my needs for a great deal. And I understand it its a no-code platform, I think being able to run custom functions against the data would be of great value (but as data-scientist / business analyst at an s&p 500 my requirements might differ from most).

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hi @Berik , I am the co-founder of Baserow. I would love to have a conversation with you about your specific use case to understand it better. Would you be open for a chat ? You can reach me on olivier@baserow.io.