"Virtual Table"

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1

Is there a way to programmatically create a table based on data in other tables? Like a VIEW in SQL? I’m having a hard time finding the right “phrase” to find what I am looking for in your docs :slight_smile: Thanks!

2

There isn’t a ‘full’ way to do this, but depending on your use case there might be a decent workaround.

3

My best “approach” so far would be to write a custom plugin that generates e.g. a HTML table. But what would be sad is, that I could not further use the generated data from that table.

4

I often use summary tables for that: Summary tables - Grist Help Center

A little-known fact is that summarizing on a Reference List or a Choice List column creates a row for each item in the list. So that allows for some tricks to produce interesting “derived” tables. Do you want to share a specific example of what you’d like to accomplish?

5

@dmitry-grist I just setup Grist and am loving it. Thank you! To pick up this conversation, I also have this need. To provide one of my examples, I have a budget that I’m capturing with the following columns: Category, Amount, Type, Month, Year. I want to transpose the data so that I have the following layout:

Category Jan Feb Mar Apr May
Car 100 100 100 100 100
Groceries 234 234 234 234 234
Mortgage 567 567 567 567 567
Insurance 89 89 89 89 89
Misc 34 34 34 34 34
Internet 23 23 23 23 23

I can use the summary table to group by Month, but I need this view to provide an annual calendar overview. Note that this is just one example that pertains to this, but let me know if you need additional information.

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For transposing months this way, Grist doesn’t yet have a great solution, but this thread about cross-tab summaries lists several approaches that may help: Crosstab with dynamic columns.

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7

Thanks, I’ll dig into that.