Bidirectional relations

Hi everyone,

I’ve been alpha testing Anytype for about 24 hours now, and I see a lot of potential in it.

I’m trying to implement a course planner system using relations. First, I made a Semester type, and created Spring 2023 and Fall 2023 as Semesters. Then, I created a Course type, and created Computer Vision and Algorithms as courses. I gave each course an object relation called Semester, which requires a Semester type object as the value. I then set the Semester for Computer Vision to be Spring 2023, and the Semester for Algorithms to be Fall 2023.

I want each Semester page to display the courses in a nice table. I realize that I can do this with an inline set, i.e. making a set of all Courses and filtering to only show the ones with, e.g. Semester of Spring 2023. However, I feel like there should be a way to do this with relations. If I add a relation Courses for each Semester, I can show a list of courses, but I want to avoid creating two separate relations that may not be consistent. Is there are way to instead create a bidirectional relation so that Courses and Semesters know about each other?

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Bidirectional relations is on our sight and we want to introduce this feature this year :pray:

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Is “bidirectional relations” in this context referring to relational database connections as in an attribute in one table being a pointer to item/s in another? IOW, the ability to pick another Type as any other relation when creating a Type? If so, is there a work-around that exists for that already? If not, is there a feature request on it? (I looked around but everyone uses different words to describe things and I’m not sure if they’re talking about the same thing or not). TIA!

The use case the OP presented sounds exactly like Notion relations. This is the FR.

There is no current work-around besides using a relation to link to object A to object B, and then using an inline set to show all the linked A objects in object B. That’s the furthest you can get right now.

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Are Notion-like relations on the roadmap yet?

They are not on the Github roadmap. Probably because only big features are featured there.

This reply above from ignatovv seems to indicate that they want to introduce them this year. Also, you can check the FR I linked previously.

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