⚡️ Ideas
Darren Brierton Darren Brierton Aug 17, 2024

Make it easier to generate nodes based on certain criteria and move them to a location

Explain the problem as you see it

Consider the following scenarios, both real ones raised by Tana users on Slack:

  1. A teacher wants to create attendance records for each of his classes. He has search nodes which show every student currently taking each course. For each class he wants to generate an attendance record for each student.

  2. A real estate agent needs to generate loan applications for a property based on lenders which meet certain criteria related to that property. He has a search node inside his property tag which finds suitable lenders. He wants to generate a loan application for that property for each of the lenders.

It is currently possible to create a command in Tana which will take care of most of this, but it is a very cumbersome process, and is very challenging for most users. Furthermore, once the nodes (attendance record, loan application) are created it can be even more of a challenge to move them to a desired location.

Why is this a problem for you?

This seems to me to be quite a common use case, not at all niche, but it is not simple at all. I suspect that most users would have no idea how to actually achieve this without help from an expert.

In cases like this where someone might have to daily produce a huge number of nodes according to well defined criteria, expecting them to do this manually is not reasonable. In the case of the teacher, if they teach four classes a day and there are 30 students in each class that is 120 attendance record nodes that would need to be created daily.

Suggest a solution

Just as we have very polished tools for querying the graph, including the ability to refer to (GRAND)PARENT and field values, I think we need a UI for inserting into the graph.