I want to be able to use the (amazing) Kanban view to prioritize tasks, and share those task priorities with people. The filter and share view features, which already exist, are so clutch for this.
It’s almost exactly what I want already! I want to be able to see the order that I put Kanban entries in when looking at the Grid view.
Welcome to Airtable Community! :slightly_smiling_face:
I would suggest that you create a Last Modified field, and set it to check for changes in the Single Select field you use in the Kanban view. You can then use Sort by date in the Kanban view .
That does help determine when an entry changes it’s state, but that’s not what I’m looking for.
I want to know what order the Kanban cards are put in. If I have 20 items in my TODO column, and I re-arrange them based on priorities I have with my team (highest priority on top) by moving them up and down in the column, I want to know that priority later. I can’t find a way to determine that ordering within the column right now.
We can (and do) have a priority value field, as a number, but those values are not great at resolving priority. It’s easier for the team to say TaskA-is-more-important-than-TaskB than it is to say TaskA-is-rank-9.1-and-TaskB-is-rank-9.05. Our best option is to un-hide the priority value field, and ‘bake in’ the priority values manually, with lots of clicking and UI navigation, while still in the kanban view, after arranging the order. I’d like an automatic process that does that for us.
This would be helpful! Unfortunately, there is no built-in way to do this in Airtable, because it doesn’t remember your sort order from one view to the next.
As you mentioned, you would have to create your own additional field to keep track of the sort order numbering.
You might be able to partially automate the filling in the values of that new field. You could write a custom JavaScript to loop through the records in the order displayed, and auto-update that new field with increasing numbers. You could do the same by iterating through records with Integromat.
It would be nice if the Batch Update block enabled us to increment numbers throughout a list of records, but it doesn’t allow that.
Your idea plus these ideas would make for good feature requests, if you want to add any of them into the #show-and-tell:product-suggestions category.
Is there a tutorial where I can learn more about manipulating Airtable data with JavaScript? Also, would the JavaScript be able to access the Kanban order, or are we back at the same problem?
You know, I actually don’t know if the JavaScript can access the Kanban order or not. It might not, because I just tested this with Integromat, and as far as I can tell, Integromat can’t access the Kanban order at all.
So it’s very possible that Airtable simply doesn’t “reveal” the Kanban Order in any way that is accessible to external tools.
To learn more about manipulating Airtable data with JavaScript, you can add the new Scripting Block to your base, and it comes with some built-in examples.
Also, @JonathanBowen has created an ongoing tutorial series here:
And @openside is curating a list of community-developed scripts here:
