Baserow 1.19: Mentions, notifications, edit/delete comments

Given Baserow’s versatility across teams of all sizes, release 1.19 brings features that make collaboration easier and more powerful.

You can now edit and delete row comments to keep your conversations nice and tidy.

Additionally, we launched @-mentions, which includes a new notification system so that you can stay on top of everything that requires your attention across Baserow!

We also continued tweaking under the hood to make the search speed up to 50 times faster. With large datasets, you’re bound to notice even more of a difference. ⚡

To top it all off, Baserow now supports self-hosting with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Here are all the latest updates:

@-mentions

You now can mention your collaborators in the comment box. Mentioning (or “tagging”) your collaborators is a great way to draw their attention to specific items within tasks and projects.

To mention a person in comments, simply type the @ symbol, select the person’s name from the dropdown, and press Enter. After the comment is published, the mentioned user will receive a notification.

Notification system

Notification is a central place where you’ll receive updates on what’s happening in your workspace. You’ll get a notification when someone mentions you in the comments, invites you to a workspace, or when a new version of Baserow is released.

When there are unread notifications in your workspace, you’ll see a badge with the number of notifications waiting for you next to the Notifications tab at the top of your side panel. Clicking on “Notifications” will open a box with all the updates, but unread notifications will be highlighted with a blue dot and a different background color. This makes it easy to identify items that require your attention quickly.

To view notifications:

• Click on Notifications in the sidebar. Notifications are shown chronologically.
• Click on any notification to jump directly to the update.

You can also choose to “Mark all notifications as read” or “Clear all” notifications.

Edit and delete row comments

You can now edit and delete row comments. This means that if you get autocorrected to “duck” and post the comment, you can still edit it to say what you really meant. 😇

To edit or delete an existing comment, simply click on the menu button to the right of the comment and choose the appropriate option.

Improved search performance

In the last few months, we have been working on improving search performance.

Under the hood, by default, when tables are created and/or their rows are modified, the cell values will be tokenized and indexed in a new Postgresql tsvector column per table field. Not only is this method considerably faster in larger datasets, but it also opens the possibility of using Postgresql’s advanced querying and ranking tools in new features in the future.

For REST API developers, this search behavior is not turned on by default, querying for rows using the search parameter will keep returning the results using the previous search mechanism, which we now call “compat”. To opt-in to using Postgresql full-text search, you can upgrade by passing an additional search_mode=full-text-with-count parameter to your requests. Downgrading again is as simple as search_mode=compat.

As a result of these changes, users will notice a dramatic increase in search performance, with queries in larger tables returning results up to 50x faster.

Baserow on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We now have a specific guide on how to deploy a horizontally scalable, production ready Baserow on ECS/Fargate to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Sort by Lookup field

From now on, you can sort the Lookup field type according to the looked up values from the linked table. All field types that can be looked up can be sorted, except formulas that result in a URL link using the button or link formula functions and date_interval formulas.

Fields can be sorted in ascending order (A → Z (or) 1 → 9 (or) ☑︎ → ☐) or descending order (Z → A (or) 9 → 1 (or) ☐ → ☑︎). Keep in mind that while sorting in ascending order, blank values nearly always appear at the top.

You can also use this feature to sort by Link Row fields by simply making a Lookup which uses that Link Row field and sort by the Lookup instead.

More colors

We have added four new color options for row coloring, single select fields, and multiple select fields. The new colors are yellow, brown, purple, and pink. Additionally, a “darker” shade of the existing dark color has been added. This brings the total number of color options to 40, instead of the previous 15.

New templates

We added new templates and improved existing ones. You can find the most recent updates on the Templates page.

• Advertising Campaigns
• Company Advertising Campaigns
• Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment Manager
• Household Chores
• Non-emergency Call Center
• Tourism Agency Manager
• Venture Capital Investments

Company news

Baserow is nominated for the Computable Awards 2023

We’re excited to be nominated by Computable Awards 2023 in the list of best Tech-startup in the Netherlands!

Please cast your vote:

1. Go to: Awards | Computable.nl and fill out the form.
2. Check your mailbox and click on the link provided.
3. Find Baserow in the list Tech-startup and hit Submit.

The page is in Dutch, but the process is straightforward and can be followed even by non-Dutch speakers.

Please help us make it to the final nominees in October.

ncScale integration

ncScale recently released a new observability feature, which is also available for Baserow! This feature provides real-time no-code asset management that includes dependency mapping, repositories, readmes, tag features, and more.

Community activities

• Discover a NodeJS Baserow client (fully in TypeScript).
• Check out a plugin that allows for sending AI-generated messages in your Baserow address book directly from ChatGPT.
• Get insights on how to automate bank transfers with Make, Baserow, and Qonto in a complete guide.
• Watch this video tutorial on how to sync booked event data on Cal.com with Baserow using n8n.

All changes, including bug fixes!

New features

• After field updates, deletions and creations Baserow now automatically vacuums the table in a background task to improve performance and reduce table disk size. This can be disabled by setting the new env var BASEROW_AUTO_VACUUM=false. #1706
• Rework Baserow row search to be much faster, work for all field types and instead search for words instead of exact matches including punctuation. Please note this new full text search mode can increase the disk space used by your Baserow tables upto 3x, to prevent this you can disable the new search and stick with the legacy slower but lower disk space usage search by setting the new env var BASEROW_USE_PG_FULLTEXT_SEARCH=false. #1706
• Add new filter is after days ago for filtering records within a specified number of past days. #1721
• Include the field name and ID in the grid view heading contexts. #1726
• allow viewers commenters and editors to make personal views #1737
• Mention other users in rows comments. #1761
• Create a notification panel to show notifications #1775
• Added the possibility to sort by lookup field and formula field resulting in a lookup for arrays of texts, numbers, booleans, and single selects #1786
• Add options to edit and delete row comments. #560
• Allow line breaks in form view descriptions #955
• Introduced the yellow, purple, brown and pink colors.
• Added “Advertising Campaigns”, “Company Advertising Campaigns”, “Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment Manager”, “Household Chores”, “Non-emergency Call Center”, “Tourism Agency Manager”, “Venture Capital Investments”, “Copy Management”, “Performance Reviews” and “Personal Finance Manager” template.

Bug fixes

• Automatically add https protcol when it is missing from links #1237
• Add prettier checks for scss files when linting. #1796
• fix inviting member whilst on invite page causing crash #1848
• Max and min can be used on date fields #684

Refactors

• Move formula language into its own module #1768
• Fix last modified not matching created on when making new rows #1779

Breaking API changes

• Baserows default max per table field limit now defaults to 600 due to full text search and undo/redo needing to use the rest of the postgres 1600 column limit. This can be reverted using the new BASEROW_MAX_FIELD_LIMIT env var. If you want to have more than 600 fields we also recommend you turn off full text search as it needs an extra column per field to work, this can be done by setting BASEROW_USE_PG_FULLTEXT_SEARCH to false. #1706
• Before when searching for a number say 1, it would match the row with id 1, 10, 11, 12 etc. Now it will only match rows with that exact id, so searching for 1 will match the row with id 1 and not the row with id 10 etc. #1706
• By default in the UI search now uses full text mode which ignores punctuation and behaves differently than the previous exact matching. For now the API defaults to search_mode=compat, however in the coming months we will switch the API default to the new mode instead. #1706
• Creating and updating row comments using the API endpoint ‘/api/row_comments’ now requires a valid ProseMirror JSON document. See ‘baserow.core.prosemirror.schema’ for details. #1761

What’s next

The next big features on the roadmap include more shortcuts, row modification history, audit log for workspaces, row grouping, and other features suggested by the community.

If you have any questions about the new updates, please leave them in our official community forum. We’re happy to answer them!