Custom Views are broken - how do I save them?

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Dear Databases team,

we have built a kind of CRM on top of Confluence Databases. A bit simplified it works like this. We have multiple tables:

• A company database with all basic information about the company.
• A contacts database with a list of all contacts. Every contact contains a relation to a company entry.
• An interactions database with a list of meeting notes, call notes, etc. Every interaction also contains a relation to a company entry.

For every company, we've got a page which lists all interactions and contacts for this company. On these pages, we list the interactions and contacts with a database macro with a custom view which applies a filter for this company.

I can still apply the filter now, but I can't see a way to save it anymore.

The only way would be to create a saved view for every company. This results in hundreds/thousands of saved views which I don't want to reuse somewhere else.

I'd like to know if you plan to fix the custom view - or which advise you'd give me for modelling my use case.

Cheers,
Matthias.

[Divya Sriram · Accepted solution]

Hey folks - thank you all for the feedback. We wanted to find a better long term solution to address this problem of referencing a subset of the original database, and it sounds like custom views played an important role in how you reference a larger database in a specific page. 

Would you have time for a quick chat so I can learn more: 

https://calendly.com/divyasriram

In the mean time, let me bring this back to my team and see how we can solve this!

Thank you @Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ @Elle Longwell @Steffen Burzlaff _K15t_ 

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

@Divya Sriram - do you still need someone to talk to? I'm back from vacation and now available for a call. And I still can't save my broken custom views. 😭

[Divya Sriram]

@Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ - custom views and editing in view mode should both be possible now, are you able to see it?

https://intercom.help/confluencedatabases/en/articles/8230163-what-s-new-with-databases 

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Thank you @Divya Sriram - that's so exciting to hear 🎉

I've already updated a custom view yesterday which worked like a charm.. 🥳

The editing in view mode is also very welcome.
At the moment, I can only edit in the database macro, but not in the database entry macro. Is this intentional?

[Elle Longwell]

We're in the exact same boat. One of our set ups consists of: 

• An "Apps" database that tracks all of our SaaS apps (as a page for each one that acts as a dashboard for _all_ of the different entries tied to it across all db's) with entry links tracking the apps that they are connected to, the service desk entry for the app (for non-it employee documentation), and a backlink to pull in service accounts tied to the app.
• A Documentation database that has entry link fields to the App database and Lifecycle Management db to be able to tie documentation to the app entry and push it to the LM entry for the app.
• A Lifecycle Management db that tracks all LM settings across our apps (sso, mfa, etc.) and lists the LM articles for the app from the documentation db via a backlink field.
• A Contacts DB that houses all of our SaaS contacts (sales/csm/etc) and ties them to the app via a entry link.
• A Service Account db that tracks all our service accounts and their information tied to each app via an entry link.

We've built it out in a way that some of these changes are completely breaking things, and so I'm just concerned about more changes coming through that will continue this trend. We've built this out to be pretty exhaustive and rely on it for a lot of stuff, so if there's an indication that features that we built it around will continue to be removed... I'm not sure how much effort it would be worth continuing to try to "fix" things by re-architecting them if they might break agean.

A specific example of this that parallels to the original poster and other commenter is on our App pages (which are the title entries for the App db). We built them to be a sort of "dashboard" for all information about our apps, so they can be managed within the db's and we don't have to worry about them getting stale due to lack of visibility on a per page basis. On these pages we have:

• An Entry Macro for the page's/app's metadata.
• An Entry Macro for the Lifecycle Management entry for the app (which automatically gets created with each new page.
• A Database Macro for the Contacts db that uses a custom view to filter down to contacts tied to the app.
• A Database Macro for the Documentation db that uses a custom view to filter down to the documentation entries from our private IT Team documentation db.
• A Database Macro for the Documentation db that uses a custom view to filter down to the documentation entries from our employee facing helpdesk documentation db.

At the moment, 3 of the 5 main uses for these pages are completely broken since the custom views feature has been removed, which sort of invalidates the use of the pages as a whole. At the very least, if it get's re-added, we'll have to spend the time going back through hundreds of entries recreating them all, which would be frustrating since we spent so much time intentionally building out the architecture of this system, but we use it enough that it would still be worth it at least. Hopefully this is just a bug and not an intentional feature removal without any communication... But I'd love to get some more insight on this.

Below are some photos of what our current App Pages look like:

[Steffen Burzlaff _K15t_]

Hi,

I have a similar problem (I think) with my database where we manage our content.

We built a database for our content workflow where we track each content piece by it's status, format, type and add several information to it like links to the published piece.

Since we manage our content in one database containing all our content formats, types and progress we need to be able to filter for different formats and types on different pages where the databases is embedded.

For example we have different pages for our Confluence Best Practice, Confluence News and other formats:

• An 'Idea Board' to collect ideas.
• a 'In Progress' board to see what's been currently worked on
• and a 'published' board which shows all published content with links, etc.

Right now, I wanted to embed a new format but without the ability to save my filters for the page I can't create our boards for this format which is a blocker.

It would be nice to know if this will be fixed or is the 'custom views' the new way to go?

Thanks in advance and Cheers,
Steffen