Support variables / formulas global to a view or structure
In Structure 8.2.0, you introduced the ability to save and share formulas. Once the formula is loaded, it is stored to the new column and not impacted by any changes to the source formula.
This does not any real-time if the formula has been shared in many locations. Updating a variable formula involves several steps (not sure reloading is much quicker).
It is also a quality risk because the user has to make sure any updates have been made everywhere. it takes several steps to verify the updates were made.
variables/formulas global to a view or structure would support the common best practice of not repeating code.
In my use case, I use templated comments for status updates. With the global variables, I could create an array with all the update values and reference them in multiple places. Depending on your implementation it would also save a lot of repeated regex lookups.
Jonathan Orgel
shared this idea
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Juls TheHon commented
Same for me, We have lots of columns with dependencies to other colums, and some of them have coefficient numbers used to have a cascading calculation and we would like to change it in one place and then have all calculations reflecting that new value of reference. Very annoying to have to either load a formula or have to re-map the variables to the changed columns... The concept to have global variables to the structure or even the view would be the most logical here.
Also the ability to load an external source to retrieve dynamically such data used as reference to do all these calculations would be a plus
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Jeff Thielman commented
I have a similar use case where I would like to start target conditions and project allocations to compare to and then reference them in several different saved columns. It would be great to have global saved variables that you can update and they propagate out to your other formulas that use those variablesl.