Hey all. I joined the forum to +1 bi-directional relationships.
Me and some friends wan to make network map, which would involve some sense of ‘affiliating’ people, groups and events. What we really need for this is a bi-directional relationship called “friend” between A and B, set once and reflected on both pages.
This seems like a really basic feature of a graph data tool.
Hello everyone. Just like dejanvu I joined this forum only because I wanted to express how important bi-directional relations are to me.
My use-case currently is building a space about greek mythology. I try to note all relations of the characters to each other and relations like “parents”, “siblings”, “offspring” etc. are so enormously tedious to track. For example, there are like at least 15 daimones that (depending on the source) all came from the same parents, thus also all are siblings of each other. No way in hell will I type down these siblings for each and every character object now. It’s tedious enough having to enter parents and children seperately everytime.
Having a means of creating real bidirectional relations like “A is parent of B” equals “B is offspring of A” and also “A is sibling of B” equals “B is sibling of A” is really essential to have. It seems people are asking for this for three years now. Are there any plans on implementing this in the near future? Due to this missing feature I have to stop working with Anytype now or I’ll be burned out before really starting out. 
EDIT: Since people mentioned Notion can do this I tried out Notion for the first time. Holy moly… I not only am able to do bidirectional relations there, but I also can do formulas! I managed to do formulas that derive siblings and half-siblings simply from the parents relation! This is black magic; I’ll never even touch Anytype again until it provides this functionality, sorry…
There’s reason to hope these features will be developed sometime in 2025.
Formulas, if I’m not mistaken, should be realized in the first half. I don’t remember an ETA for bidirectional linking, but I’m optimistic enough to believe it’ll make it to next year’s roadmap.
But in the meanwhile, if you ever publish this Greek mythology database, please do share the link, I’d love to see and learn. Eventually, Anytype’s graph view would be really pretty for this.
Hi there !
I think I haven’t seen mentioned another crucial feature that comes with bidirectional relationships + roll up , which each is the rich filtering capabilities they can provide.
Let’s say I have a Task with an assignee relationship toward a human. If I want to see all the tasks assigned to a specific human, I can easily do so with an inline set.
However, what I really want to know is the list of humans that are currently idle, meaning that aren’t the target of any assignee relationship. I.e., I want a set of human, filtered on the reverse relationship assignedTasks when the relationship is empty
Alternatively, I want to be able to create a roll-up on a set of Humans, that count the number of task, and show the humans that have 0 tasks.
Hope this can contribute to the discovery process on this feature !
Hello all,
I’m trying to find any news from the anytype team on this topic. Anything ?
Great day !
We would like to implement it in the future, but we don’t have any kind of ETA for it at the moment.
I think a great next iteration of the simple formulas functionality would be to have them as a relation as well. As simple formulas have now been implemented, it might not be a huge step any longer to implement this specifically as well.
This indirectly partly solves the lack of rollups on Anytype as rollups have frequently been used to do simple calculations. You could attach an object to a collection and add your needed simple formula relations that way.
For example, this is a page from a database I made to show some simple yearly stats of books I’ve read (yes, I’m not a heavy reader, I’m trying my best I swear 
).
I would be able to replicate that on Anytype if this were to be implemented.
Happy to turn this into a separate feature request if needed.
Hey @veryalex Although the aesthetic might not be as nice as yours, you should be able to do something like this already in v.0.44.0. If you have a Completion date relation, then you would be able to create a set/collection and filter the books completed in 2024, then you could ask Anytype to Count the number of objects you have in this set view, as well as Math>Sum up the total page numbers in all the completed books.
At least you can see the numbers 
@C.c You are correct and I have considered it with the intention of moving away from Notion as much as possible as soon as possible. I’m already using the new feature for other stuff btw. 
My suggestion is a next iteration of that new feature since v0.44.0. The Anytype team calls it “simple formulas”, so I refer to it as that too. I’m suggesting to further extend it by showing the simple formulas as a relation.
My screenshot was merely a sample of how it works technically to compare Notion’s rollups to Anytype’s simple formulas. In reality, these pages would show up like this (more embarrassment of how little I read…).
I can’t replicate this on Anytype. But I could if it were possible to show off the counts of columns in collections as relations and put said collections in a set/collection.
“templates don’t yet allow references to “this” object”
Is there a feature request for this? It is another essential feature to me!
Also, despite the years passed since the request for bi-directional linking and rollups(which I’m not complaining about, the team probably had greater priorities), I can’t find anything about them on the roadmap. Am I missing something? Also, the app already has some primitive example of bi-directional linking in the form of Backlinks, so I guess some work has already been done.
+1 for rollups
@Filip Any updates on this since last November?
Unfortunately no.
Capacities just came up with their two-way properties in their latest update a few days ago and it looks amazing. Along with all the Notion examples given here, the Anytype team can also look at how Capacities did theirs and draw inspiration from it, Capacities did it quite well.
https://capacities.io/whats-new/release-50
Boosting this for wanting to be able to have bi-directional links!
I have people assigned to stations, and it would be great if on the station pages I could see who was running the station, without having to read the list of all backlinks. Currently I could create a separate property and write who was running it, but that wouldn’t update if I reassigned someone.
Also adding links to more requests for the same Inverse relations/Named relation backlinks and Inverse relations!
that’s slick. i like how that’s implemented as well
Just want to add my description of this topic here, as it has been closed:
Bidirectional property connections are not established - is this normal? - Help - Anytype Community
Not sure if this goes here, but I think so.
What I imagine is that when inside my object „Ferrari“ of type „car“ I add an Object „steering wheel“ of type „component“. That then the Ferrari automatically has a property „components“ linking to the steering wheel and whatnot. And vice versa.
I’m just wondering if this is a concept that this thread is talking about.
Exactly. Just a note, to remove any ambiguity: the name of the property isn’t dictated by the type of object you’re connecting, but needs to be set manually by the user.
Anyway, as much as I appreciate Anytype and its mission, I’ll be switching to another software until Bi-directional linking is added. After that, I’ll gladly go back.
