So I’m finding Baserow quite nice for creating tables of data, and for basic linking between tables. However, one area I’m finding almost no functionality is actually using that data outside of the context of a filtered table.
What I really want to be able to do, is create a view that shows summary data with a little more sophistication than the bottom row of a Grid view. Something akin to a “report” or “dashboard”.
For example, let’s say I have a table describing a large number of items. Each item might have a variety of “tags” assigned via a Multiple Select field, a couple of notes in a Text field, and maybe some Boolean and Number fields for good measure.
Now I want to know:
For each Multiple Select tag, how many items are assigned to it?
How many items have a certain keyword mentioned in their notes?
How many items have a value in that Number field, between a certain range
And so on, for anything you might want to write a formula for.
In other words, if I’m making any sense, I’d really like some sort of general purpose report view functionality for tables.
With a conventional database, I’d just write a handful of queries to get the information I want, and then display it.
With Baserow, I can’t think of any way to do this besides writing some out-of-band script that uses the REST API to pull things together.
That’s a really great idea, and we have just discussed this internally.
This has been something that would help not just you, but also other users. For example I think all of these requests could have been resolved by having a more central dashboard:
So we see a couple ways this could be implemented, and we would love to hear your feedback on our suggestions.
Add a new “Dashboard View”
This would probably be the easiest implementation on our end. What exactly you could do with such a view would still need to be defined, but I think we are on the same page generally when it comes to what we mean by “dashboard” ( some place where we can summarise and compare multiple rows easily). This solution would be limited to only one table, since we work with views on a per-table level.
Add a “Dashboard Application type”
By application type, we are referring to what you select when you click on the sidebar on “Create New” and you would then have a “Dashboard” application next to “Database”. That would make it possible to view and collect data across multiple databases, which is something users have been asking for a ton as well.
Please let us know your thoughts, we appreciate any feedback
Having a “Dashboard View” where I could add formulas that iterate across all the rows in a table, would absolutely meet my needs here.
Just don’t forget to include support for handling multiple-select fields, which somehow seem neglected by other formula cases. Also, being able to follow cross-table links in a dashboard formula would be another extremely useful feature.
Has this progressed at all?
Is this something that the “builder” feature will address?
After tinkering with BaseRow for quite a while, I started using it for a different use case and immediately realised I can do basic “reporting” to answer questions such as:
What are the counts of different choices in this choice field?
Sum everything in this column, if this other column has a particular value.
I know this is a slippery slope because then you’ll want different types of graphs, dragging and dropping to rearrange “widgets” in a report etc.
