[Koc]

This is continuation of #2248 that allows to display more column from relation table.
There are 2 tables: employees and vacations. We can add vacation.requester relation column that referenced to the row id of the employee and display employee.name. But what if we need to display more column from the related table? e.g. employee.department. That's where relation lookup can help: select already existent relation and choose what extra column should be displayed.

🖼️ Screenshots

🗒️ TODO

• Merge Refactor: Extract getTableCellComponent helper for better reusability #2763 first

[enjeck]

That's where relation lookup can help: select already existent relation and choose what extra column should be displayed.

Having a relation column, and a lookup column is extremely confusing. Even with this, I had to think extra hard to understand how they're different. If I'm struggling to understand as the dev, I doubts users will easily get it (or maybe it's just me, lol).

I would need others to check if they understand this just from the description and images. Maybe @nextcloud/designers need to weigh in

[Koc]

well, that's pretty similar to Excel's VLOOKUP function. But I'm open to changes here, let's wait for our designers

[kra-mo]

I certainly think the names should be changed at least. @marcoambrosini, ideas?

Let's also just say that Excel's ancient statistics-oriented DSL is maybe not the best language to draw inspiration from when it comes to design ;)

[marcoambrosini]

the "Lookup" term is used for this in both Baserow and Airtable. For the relational ones they use the wording "Link to table". I would do the same

Maybe this can help: https://baserow.io/user-docs/lookup-field

[Koc]

@samin-z I've rebased branch, fixed conflicts and code review comments, pipeline, added new tests.

[jospoortvliet]

Team, in case it helps - a real-world use case from within Nextcloud, maybe relevant for the design discussion on this lookup/show a field of the linked row thing.

We track press coverage in Tables: one row per article (~2,400 rows), and a separate "PR Outlets" table with one row per outlet (website, YouTube channel, print title) holding Audience, Tier, Vertical and Country. Classification is per outlet, so every article should show its outlet's values.

Over the weekend I wrote a script that copies these values over via the API because there's no built-in mechanism in Tables.

What we would need from lookups;

• Show several fields of the linked row as their own columns (Audience, Tier, Vertical, Country).
• Use them in view filters and sorting (e.g. "Tier = T1", "Country = Germany") and, if possible, in Nextcloud Analytics.
• Export them as values in CSV/API, not row IDs.
• Lookups of lookups: Country links to a Countries table that holds the reporting Region, so article → outlet → country → region.

Then, another thing: live vs frozen values. When we re-classify an outlet from Tier 3 to Tier 2, we'd like old rows to change. I guess it works that way, but I just want to clarify...

wrt naming, "Link to table" + "Lookup" (as in Airtable/Baserow) would be clear to me at least...

@samin-z can show you our tables if you want ;-)