Calculated Fields Limitations

Hello!

Using linked fields in calculated fields is a big up, but I still find the calculated fields very very limited. I find myself constantly needing to divert back to the API or Excel to make any fields beyond very simple calculations. My biggest concerns are:

-Very Low Character limit on calculated fields, making more complex conditional fields pretty much impossible to do within Shotgrid
-No specified functions, for example NETWORKDAYS would benefit a lot of calculations. The duration fields/values have nearly no use in my case because it counts weekends. (Iā€™ve seen this requested by folks on here, but no current plans on roadmap to address this)
-ā€˜Containsā€™ condition for text fields. (Ex. If Task Name contains Keyword)
etc.

If the calculated fields had half of the functions/capabilities of excel formulas, Iā€™d be able to do a whole lot more and a whole lot faster with Shotgrid. Just wanted to create a discussion on here if anyone else has similar concerns.

Thanks,

-Phil F

2 Likes

Hi Phil,

Bear in mind that Calculated fields are computed on-the-fly. It means that querying complex fields could tend to be slow. Especially when used for grouping, sorting or filtering, because we then have to compute the result on all entities. That being said, itā€™s possible to slightly increase the limit in the settings, you can reach out to support and ask them to help you with this.

Weā€™ve discussed implementing something like NETWORKDAYS in the past. Only ignoring weekends would be fairly easy, but weā€™ve been told it would need to take into account Work Schedules, which is more complex.

A CONTAINS function would be fairly easy to do though!

Antoine

2 Likes

Would be so great if I could sort a calculated field.

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I could really use a couple string-to-number conversion functions. Even just an INT() would be really helpful. LEFT, RIGHT, and MID are great for extracting numbers from strings, but without the text-to-number conversions, you cannot then do further mathematical operations.

Also a HUGE upvote for WorkSchedule-aware date functionsā€¦ though I understand thatā€™s much more of a challenge.

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I think you mean ā€œsort query fieldsā€, which yes is a feature request that dates back over a decade.

Calculated fields are sortable.