Assignee Field Drill-in
Y
YES Integrations
The assignee field is similar to a linked record field in many ways: assignees are stored as special records in SmartSuite, with IDs and fields similar to normal records.
It would open up a world of possibilities if the Assignee field could be used like a linked record field in formulas, with access to the backlinks from wherever it is referenced (so you could write [Assignee].[Link to Another Table].[Field]).
For a use case take the situation where hourly rates for staff members may change. Centrally storing these rates in SmartSuite records would be very useful (because they can be amended in one place), but actually using the rates in calculations is hard. If we could write [Assignee].[Link to Staff Members].[Hourly Rate] in a formula it would make the database structure much simpler.
For another use case take the situation where a formula needs to know how many open tasks a user has. That's hard right now (you would need to centrally link tasks to one record with automations) but could be done via the assignee with
COUNTIF([Assignee].[Link to Tasks].[Status] != "Complete", [Assignee].[Link to Tasks].[Title])
Jon Darbyshire
Hiya YES Integrations, thanks for this post! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide more examples of the calculations you would like to perform using the Assignee field?
- Are there any specific limitations or issues you've encountered with the current system that led to this request?
- How frequently do the hourly rates for staff members change and how does this impact your current workflow?
Y
YES Integrations
Jon Darbyshire
- It would be good to be able to access parts of the members directory in formula too, e.g. availability. I think generally there are a lot of use cases for using the assignee field as a link
- A specific limitation is that you can't set a default value for a linked record field, which means automations have to be used to link any record in a given table that should be used in formulas involving the whole table. You can set a default assignee, so using an assignee as a linked record gets around that
- Not that frequently but making a mistake when they do change and not updating them in all the correct places is a concern