How to Coda Commitment?
Using the Gmail Pack and smart buttons
In my blog on how to Coda Permissions I demonstrated a logic to provide access to users in a predefined order using button. But how do you know it is your turn and how do you get informed?
Though for these two questions we can provide a practical solution, you want to keep you team committed and not distracted. How do you do that? This is question three. Let’s start at the beginning.
How do you know it is your turn?
Since it concerns an action (sending an email or a notification) something needs to change. The easiest start is pressing a button to set the permission process in motion. This button sends a message to the users in the first row and gets disabled as soon as one has (or all have) granted permission. Below how this could look like.
Once we have kicked of, the buttons that handle the agreement also take care of alerting the next one(s) in line. For the sake of the example I isolated this part of the code. A key element is the Row Index, I describe in this blog.
First, the code below gets the Row Index related to the user in the column ‘TheLast’. Second it gives this outcome a name using WithName() and third sets a filter on the AlertTable by adding 1 to the outcome (the RowIndex) to get the next in line.
That is it for cases in which we deal with a hierarchy as in the permission table. It also happens you have a group of people and they all have to have their say. So no hierarchy or any kind of specific order. You want to alert the ones that did not yet give their Go. Below how you can do this.
How to inform people?
My initial idea was the one below. Let the users make their choice how to inform others, be it via email or a notification. It is a bit of coding, but very well doable.
When I proposed this idea, the feedback was rather straightforward: we don’t like notifications so much, too many and unclear where to look.
Is then the email a valuable alternative? Not if we use it as a direct replacement of notifications. Though emails can deliver a richer content and thus better formulated and clearer message, too much remains too much.
How to Coda Commitment?
The idea that came up was to email everybody at the beginning of the process and if a participant felt that it took too long for others to catch up, (s)he should alert the team manager who then could reach out in person.
How to translate this idea into a practical solution?
It starts with the creation of an extra button on the canvas to alert users. First all users and second only the team manager. In the personalized email we provide clear instructions on what is expected, including a due date.
Before the button I put a controller linking to the table containing the project and thus the participants and the team lead. By selecting the project, the filter in the button permits you to use this logic for several projects at the same time in your doc. It crossed my mind that this solution would be more user friendly than in one document several permission tables.
What happens next is that first the complete team get an invite with a due date and a link to the relevant table. On their own terms they can take part in the process. When this takes too long, one can always ask the team leader for an intervention (s)he will also receive the names of those that did not yet find the time to join and the days left.
There are many ways to polish the experience even further like working with colors and emojis, with a final reminder day one minus due date, an automated email to thank everybody for their participation and so on.
Which policies you should implement depends on what you believe is right for your team. What I’d like you to take away from this blog is that there is often more possible than the obvious. Coda permits any maker to be creative.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have questions feel free to reach out. Though this article is for free, my work (including advice) won’t be, but there is always room for a chat to see what can be done. Besides you find my (for free) contributions to the Coda Community and on Twitter
My name is Christiaan Huizer and I am the owner of Huizer Automation. A company specialized in serving SME in harvesting data and keeping it aligned. I am a Coda Expert and rely mainly on Coda, Mailjet, Zapier & Paperform to get the job done.
