Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I find myself too often making changes to a template. With this change, I would like to apply these template changes to existing objects. I have to do it manually for all my objects.
Describe the solution you’d like
Would be great to have a feature to apply changes to a template to existing objects. This option could be optional - depends on the end user if he/she wants to apply changes to the template to existing objects.
I also really need this feature! And besides that, when applying a template to an existing object, there could be an option to erase all current blocks or just insert the ‘templated’ blocks at the start. That way the user would not necessarily loose the information in blocks that are not relations.
This is badly needed, specially how sets/types and templates work in Anytype.
An update all button or something simular would be awesome.
Before you make a set and want to add objects you NEED a template and you NEED to have thought of EVERYTHING beforehand. If you edit the template you then have to add those edits to all existing objects and when you have a few 100 it is not workable!
For example, I am making a set for my (steam) game library where I made a relation called Summary. Yesterday I changed my mind and want to use the description relation for this. So I removed Summary from the template and added Description.
Now I can go true all existing objects, one by one …
I want this feature, too. One of my use cases is that: as I create an “Book”-type object in the template provided by Anytype to establish a bibliographical record for a novel and then fill in the “Author” relation field of object, I actually create an new object or selecting an existing object (for example, “John Doe”, or “RAND Corp.” when the author is an institution rather than a natural person). In this case, this created/selected object is expected to be a “Human” or “Company”-type object and worthy to be formatted with templates designed under “Human”/“Company” type; yet I have to edit this created/selected object from scratch, which is very frustrating.
I do hope that template is not only useful when creating a new object from the type page. Following the UI and functional suggestion by Thiago, I want to additionally suggest that, when this object is already assigned to a certain type (for example, “John Doe” would be assigned as “Human”), then users can select existing templates from “Human” type (for example, ”author profile“, “journalist profile”, etc.)
I also want to upvote this. I’m two days into my Anytype journey. This is the first thing that moved me to post, because I’m a perfectionist who is now constantly considering formats/template to set up my Anytype world so that I don’t redo work.
Hi there !
Thanks for your great work. Same as Winewalker, it’s day 2 for my Anytype experience and i already miss this feature. It will be an amazing time saver !
Started creating a Plant Type to keep track of my collection
Added a few individual Objects using the Plant Type
Noticed I could do a better job at organizing the Plant Type page / template / canvas (whatever it’s called) while also adding a few more pieces of relevant information to it (relations and also just plain text with some formatting)
Made the changes to the template
Went back to my previously created Objects using the Plant Type
Noticed they weren’t updated and didn’t care about any updates I did to the Plant Type template
Went under my bed and started crying
What I was expecting was to be able to assign a “master template” to a Type so that it forever references the layout of the master (the template). That would allow iteration on the Type while not requiring manual update to the page/canvas of hundreds of Objects created using that same Type.
Definitely understand the pain here and these requests have not gone unnoticed.
We have a couple projects to push out related to decluttering and easier Type creation, then we’ll dive into Templates. Lots of good feedback regarding enhanced Template functionality on the forums - thanks everyone for leaving your thoughts for our team to chew on!
Just to not let this be forgotten. Another +1 from me. It is a feature that if it is not going to be available it would be a deal breaker. Without the capacity of updating objects automatically when your template evolves according to your needs, one would spend hours detecting and updating objects manually.
It is a must have future proofing feature, IMO.
Hi Diego, thanks for the +1, this is something I really want too:
I even talked about it directly to the team in a user research meeting and I can assure you that they are aware of the importance of this kind of feature.
That said, I can imagine this is not easy to implement so I wonder what exactly we will get and when.
Just to add, that this is a really critical feature rather than a nice to have.
Most of the posts here are about applying changes to existing templates, but there is a more basic use case that I want to highlight which is when you create an empty object on the fly and want to populate it later.
My workflow for meeting notes, for instance, is to type my notes up and create objects on the fly where I think it would be relevant. For instance: “Met with [[John Smith]] and [[Jane Smith]] who mentioned that they were spending most of their time on [[Project X]]”
After creating the objects for John Smith, Janes Smith and Project X in my notes I then want to be able to turn those objects into contacts and projects respectively.
I mention this because I recognise that the “convert book template v0.1 to book template v0.2” is a pretty challenging workflow, but adding a template to a blank object should be straightforward.
Hi @boulderer, thanks for your feedback! I’d like to make sure I’ve properly understood your use-case so we can replicate it and put it in the context of all feedback related to Templates.
When you’re typing your meeting notes, you’re using @ key to create John Smith, Jane Smith, and Project X, who become Notes. You then need to manually go to John Smith and Jane Smith, change the Type to Human, and do the same for Project X (change it to Project type). When changing the Type of an already-created Object, you are not given the choice to apply a template (or which template to apply) - it’s just blank.
Could you confirm that I’ve understood correctly? Thanks in advance