Baserow 1.15: Personal views, timezones, date/time functions

Baserow 1.15 introduces several highly-requested features, including personal views, new formula functions, timezone changes, and more. Here’s a detailed overview of what’s new and improved in Baserow!

Timezone support

By default, Baserow stores all dates in the UTC timezone. However, you can now select a timezone for your date fields and choose to display dates in your local timezone. Baserow will automatically convert between timezones within seconds. You also have the option to show the timezone.

today() and now() formula functions

Introducing two new formula functions: today() and now(). The today() function returns the current date, while the now() function returns the current date and time.

The today() function is useful for displaying the current date in a table or calculating intervals. The now() function is handy for displaying the current date and time or performing calculations based on the current date and time that update whenever you open your database. Both functions update every 10 minutes, allowing you to create more powerful formulas involving dates in Baserow.

Personal views

Personal views are a new feature that allows you to create your own views separate from shared “collaborative” views.

When creating a new view, you can choose between collaborative and personal view types. Collaborative views are visible to all workspace users, while personal views are only visible to the creator. Personal views are incredibly useful for experimenting with filters or sorting data without affecting your teammates’ configurations. For example, you can create a personal view with filters to show only your highest priority tasks assigned to you.

Personal views are currently available in Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.

API and importer upgrades for link to table, single and multiple select fields

The file importer now supports importing to link row, single select, and multiple select columns, automatically setting up links or options for you. This functionality is also available via the API, allowing you to create and update rows with link row, single select, and multiple select text values without providing internal IDs.

Previously, when creating a row with a link row field, you could only provide numerical IDs of the rows you wanted to link to (e.g., [1,2,3,4]). Now, you can provide the values of the target row’s primary field (e.g., ["name of row 1", "name of row 2", "name of row 3", "name of row 4"]). This also applies to single select and multiple select fields. These improvements make it easier to build integrations with Baserow, eliminating the need for filtering and lookups to find row IDs or select option IDs.

New in templates

We have added new templates and made improvements to existing ones. Check out the Templates page for the latest updates.

• Health Inspection Reports
• Home Remodeling
• SMB Business Plan
• Business Goal Tracker (OKRs)

Community activities

We want to express our gratitude to everyone who participated in the first #MadeWithBaserow contest. We received numerous outstanding submissions that showcased unique and creative uses of Baserow. Take a look at them and congratulate the winners here!

AMA on automation

Join us for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session about workflow automation on March 9, 2023! Troy Tessalone from Automation Ace, a certified Zapier expert and the #1 Zapier Community contributor, will be answering your questions and sharing tips and tricks for creating powerful workflows.

Get all the details here.

Code contributions

We would like to acknowledge Christian Knell for building the Baserow Helm Chart, which allows you to set up your own Baserow instance on a Kubernetes cluster in seconds.

Thanks to Riadh Habbachi for fixing a bug with the backend-test-workspace-1 split workspace condition.

We also appreciate Shohan Dutta Roy for contributing a feature to add the “Contains word” filter type.

Tutorials

→ Troy Tessalone contributed a blog post on the top 5 database automation mistakes (and how to avoid them)

→ Kim-David Nguyen shared a quick guide on how to deploy Baserow on AWS.

→ SwitchUpCB prepared a detailed tutorial on how to set up Baserow with SSL.

→ Marius updated his guide on how to Install Baserow on your Synology NAS (now with the power of the Portainer stack).

A big thank you to everyone who helps us create educational content about Baserow! 💙

All changes and bug fixes

Here’s a summary of all the changes and bug fixes in Baserow 1.15.0:

• When right-clicking on the row add button in the grid view, you can now add multiple rows at a time.
• Made Commenter role free for Advanced and Enterprise plans.
• Added links in docs to new community maintained Baserow helm chart at https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/christianknell/baserow.
• Added e2e tests.
• Added open telemetry exporters for logging, traces and metrics enabled using the BASEROW_ENABLE_OTEL env var.
• Added “Contains word” and “Doesn’t contain word” filter for TextFieldType, LongTextFieldType, URLFieldType, EmailFieldType, SingleSelectFieldType, MultipleSelectFieldType and FormulaFieldType (text) fields.
• Users can now create their own personal views.
• Allowed closing file preview by clicking outside.
• Link row field can now be imported.
• Improved create and edit field context:
• Introduced a new command, permanently_empty_database, which will empty a database of all its tables.
• Personal views improvements regarding premium.
• Show row and storage usage on Premium admin workspace page.
• Added is_nan and when_nan formula functions.
• Can add a row with textual values for single select, multiple select and link row field.
• Added missing actions for audit log.
• Added missing procps system package to all-in-one docker image fixing /baserow/supervisor/docker-postgres-setup.sh run.
• Stop backend from failing hard during CSV export if a character can’t be encoded.
• Fixed Brotli decoding issue where you sometimes cannot import from Airtable.
• Fixed being able to submit lookup field options without a field being selected.
• Fixed API docs for creating and updating rows are missing for Multiple Select and Multiple Collaborator fields.
• Fixed stuck jobs when an error occurs while in pending state.
• Fixed backspace stop responding due to double mixins.
• Fixed issue where you wouldn’t get an error if you inserted whitespace only into a form text field.
• Improved the handling of taking a snapshot of, or duplicating, a database with many thousands of tables.
• Disabled silky_analyze_queries by default in developer env as it causes double data updates.
• Fixed memory leak when using our example docker-compose and an HTTPS URL in BASEROW_CADDY_ADDRESSES files caused by an incorrect Caddy healthcheck.
• Single scrollbar for Personal and Collaborative views.
• Fixed 500 error when fetching an aggregation that computes to NaN.
• Fixed date field failing hard when trying to pre-fill an empty form value.
• Fixed SimpleGridView graphical glitches:
• Upgraded Django Channels to version 4 and bumped other dependencies.
• Moved enterprise imports out of core.
• Improved row before insert and move performance by refactoring the order to a fraction system.
• Improved existing templates:
  • Benefit Show Manager
  • Business Expenses
  • Emergency Triage Log
  • Employee Directory
  • Team Check-ins

Breaking API changes

• Removed BASEROW_COUNT_ROWS_ENABLED and BASEROW_GROUP_STORAGE_USAGE_ENABLED env vars and replace them with a new setting on the settings page.
• Baserow formula breaking change formula functions now automatically coerce null arguments to sensible blank defaults. 'some text' + null = 'some text' instead of previously resulting in ‘null’ for example. Check out this community post for more information.

What’s next?

The next major features on the roadmap are: advanced conditions (advanced filtering combining AND & OR), calendar, and timeline views. We’ll also continue working on features suggested by the community and fixing bugs.

If you have any questions about the new updates or anything else, feel free to ask in the official community forum. We’re always here to help!