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Beyond the Date Picker
A table-driven approach to solving Coda’s date picker pain points.
The native date picker in Coda is straightforward, but as we’ve learned, the simple assumptions it’s built on don’t always hold up in the real world. While it’s fine for picking a simple date, its lack of flexibility becomes a significant hurdle for more complex solutions like resource planning. An assumption that a date is always available falls apart when you need to account for a bike shop’s specific opening hours or a national holiday. Coda’s native picker doesn’t allow for a predefined range of days or for filtering dates based on data in other tables. This limitation means you can’t easily show a user when a resource, such as a meeting room or a bike, is actually free. While you can add a formula to flag an invalid entry, you are still left with an unsightly red dot and an error message, which is far from a user-friendly experience. This long-standing pain point forces us to find a more intelligent way to manage date and time selection, one that creates a smoother, more professional experience for everyone involved.
Setting up the Base Tables
The first step in building a smarter system is to move from the native date picker to lookup tables that act as our data sources. You can quickly generate these tables with Coda AI…
