Related issue: Use color choice from a referenced table
Any updates on this “style library” idea? I have a few lists of Choices with styles that I would like to be synchronized across different pages/widgets. Sometimes a person adds a new choice/style to the options of one of the fields in one widget, but that choice and style isn’t available in the other widgets, even though both cells might reference the same value.
For example, I have a widget that shows Tasks in a list. Each Task has a reference column to a Project, and each Project has a “Type”. In the Task list, I show $Project.Type using a formula column.
Project.Type is itself a Choice column type, and it has an associated set of Choice options and styles. But when I display the Project.Type field in the Task list, it doesn’t automatically have the same Choice options and styles, so I need to copy them from Project.Type and put them in Task.Project.Type.
But if I make another page with different widgets that also list Tasks (for example with different default filters), I need to set that formula column to a Choice type as well and copy the styles from Project.Type again. It’s hard to keep track of all of the Choice lists that reference the same underlying Project.Type field.
I considered creating a simple table that just has a “Name” column to hold the values so that there is one source of truth and then they aren’t scattered across a bunch of different Choice fields. BUT, I couldn’t figure out a way to consistently style the field in different views. I can set conditional cell styles in the table, but those colors/styles aren’t applied when I reference the field in a different table.
I think the conditional styles don’t apply everywhere (even though I have the “Common” conditional rules setting selected) because the conditional cell rule is $Name == 'test' in one table, but when I reference that field in another table, the conditional cell rule would have to be $Type.Name == 'test' or $Project.Type.Name == 'test'. So because each table references the cell differently, the conditional cell styles aren’t applied everywhere the cell is used. And you can’t copy/paste conditional rule styles like you can copy/paste Choice options/styles, so I am leaning toward using scattered Choice fields right now, but having everything in a single table seems like it would be nice.
(I also like being able to see the style of each option in the autocomplete list when you’re setting the value in a field. Choice options/styles are visible as colored pills, but Reference options don’t have any styling, even if conditional cell styles are set)
Any thoughts or solutions to this? It’d be very nice if we could set the Choices/styles once for a field and anytime that field is referenced (for example, in a formula column), the choices and styles are automatically available. Or, alternatively, if we could set a cell conditional style for a value in the simple Type_Options table and have it applied anywhere that field is used, that would work, too.
Basically some sort of universal choice list with styles (either with the Choice column type or the Reference column type) would be nice, so I only need to update options/styles in one place.