Link two grist Documets

Hi,

Is there a way to link to another document in Grist? In my case they would reside in the same workspace.

The reason I ask is because I would like to have a document with our users (in our case, teachers, students and staff). And it would be a complete table, with all the information about them (like phone, email, address, and so on) But I have several different documents with a variety of functions, like one for fotocopies, one for grades, one only for teacher stuff, and instead of having one giant Document with all the features and a lot of Access rules it would be nice to link one document to the users document, for example.
Right now, the only way to keep these documents separated is to have the user list in every one of them, but that means keeping track of changes in several places.

If this feature exist, I would like to know how, and if not, I woul like to know if it is on the roadmap. Does anyone else need this?

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Hi Paul, did you find any solution for this in the several months since your post?

As far as I am aware, the only way to do that would be to have an integration/automation program like n8n or Zapier.

Thus, when a record is created in a table, it creates a record or a link in another table in another document.

Thank you for your response, but I went for the easier route, and made one big document, turns out it is no even that big.

Hi,

We are encountering a similar challenge with the growing number of documents, where several datasets should ideally be referenced as a single source of truth rather than being duplicated throughout. Paul’s comment on access management is also highly relevant.

Could we have an academic discussion to explore these options:

  1. Enabling cross-document referencing of items within a Grist workspace/ workspaces.
  2. Extending per-user access management to cover all documents in addition to existing permissions.
  3. Enabling search and folder structure to organise tables if all data needs to be built within a single document.

Not sure if this was created only on the Grist Discord server or also here on the forum

Posted by Nick

What’s this? Dmitry has whipped up a proof-of-concept using better-sqlite3 (GitHub - WiseLibs/better-sqlite3: The fastest and simplest library for SQLite3 in Node.js.) and streaming fetches to display millions of rows in Grist? And the only features it breaks are importing and exporting, formulas, access rules, filtering, summary tables, search, snapshots/history… and perhaps more?

This is just a peek at the tinkering in the “labs” part of Grist Labs, and we hope to share more experiments in the future.

Check it out: Book Recommendations (Big) - Grist

Thus it seems in terms of huge databases and speed, they are solving the problem.

However, there is still a problem for big documents:

Confusing permissions window: since even stuff like hiding columns are all done from the permissions, for all tables and their columns.

Complex rules for a few tables can create a nightmare window where its difficult to find stuff.

If you have a SINGLE document with potentially several DOZEN tables, management will be hell.

The SAME problem (single document with several dozen tables) will also manifest in the menu.

Since we can´t hide menu easily, since the menu isn´t auto-foldable…