1.15 release of Baserow

In the last few weeks, our development team has been working hard to bring you a number of highly requested brand-new functionalities. Today we are pleased to provide you with an extensive overview of which new features were added to Baserow 1.15, including personal views, new formula functions, timezone changes, and much more. Keep on reading to go dive into all the new and improved in Baserow!

Timezone support

In Baserow, all dates are stored in the UTC timezone by default. You can now select a timezone for your date fields. In addition to this, you can optionally see the dates in your local timezone. If you want to switch from one timezone to another, Baserow will do an automatic conversion in a few seconds. You can optionally choose if you wish to show the timezone.

today() and now() formula functions

We are introducing the today() function, which returns the current date, and the now() function — which returns the current date AND time.

The today() function is useful when you need to have the current date displayed in a table. It is also useful for calculating intervals.

The now() function is useful when you need to display the current date and time on your table or calculate a value based on the current date and time, and have that value updated each time you open your database.

Both functions update every 10 minutes and allow you to build more powerful formulas around dates in Baserow.

Personal views

Personal view is a new feature that allows you to create your own personal views, separate from shared “collaborative” view.

When creating a new view, you can now choose between collaborative and personal view types:

• Collaborative views are visible to all group users.
• Personal views are only visible to the person creating them.

Personal views are extremely useful to play around with filtering or sorting a table’s data — this way you don’t need to worry about affecting the configurations of your teammates. For example, you could create a personal view with filters to only show your tasks with the highest priority that are 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 can import to link row, single and multiple select columns and automatically set them up with links or options for you.

This is also available via the API, so now you can create and update rows with link row, single and multiple select text values instead of having to provide the internal ids.

Previously when creating a row with a link row field, you could only ever provide the numerical IDs of the rows you want to link to, for example [1,2,3,4]. Now, you can provide the values of the target row’s primary field, for example ["name of row 1", "name of row 2", "name of row 3", "name of row 4"]. This also works for single select and multiple select fields.

This makes building integrations with Baserow much easier, as you no longer need to do filtering and lookups to figure out the row’s ID or select option ID.

New in Templates

We added new templates and improved existing ones. On the Templates page, you can find the most recent updates.

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

Community activities

First, we want to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who participated in the first community contest “Made With Baserow”.We received a lot of great submissions, all of which showcased unique and creative ways people are using Baserow. Make sure to check them out, as well as congratulate the winners here.

AMA on automation

Mark your calendars and join us for the AMA about workflow automation on the 9th of March!

Our invited expert, Troy Tessalone of Automation Ace, Certified Zapier expert and the #1 Zapier Community contributor will be answering your questions on all things workflow automation as well as sharing his tips and tricks for creating powerful workflows.

Get all the details here.

Code contributions

We want to acknowledge Christian Knell who built the Baserow Helm Chart so that you can bootstrap your own instance of Baserow on a Kubernetes cluster in seconds.

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

We also appreciate Shohan Dutta Roy, who contributed a feature to add filter type ‘Contains word’.

Tutorials

→ Troy Tessalone contributed a blog post on 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).

Big thank you to everyone who helps us to prepare educational content about Baserow 💙

All changes including the bug fixes!

• 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 group 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 big features in the roadmap are condition groups (advanced filtering combining AND & OR) plus calendar and timeline views. In addition, we will continue working on features suggested by the community and fixing bugs.

Do you have questions regarding the new updates? Or anything else? Leave your questions in our official community forum — we’re always happy to answer them!