Scrivener - Relationship as a list

Hi,

After hours scratching my head about the new way AT3 deals with items, I finally realized that relationship items can only be synced to Scrivener as textfields when selecting “custom metadata”.

This is a regression compared to AT2. For instance, the Observer used to sync as a list. But now, it’s limited to a textfield. The risk here is about manual inputs in Scrivener. Making a typo in the content of that field in Scrivener would result in creating another entry in AT3 and lead to corrupt the database.

Regarding Participants and other multi entries type of items, Scrivener can’t handle this, so it’s fine to use a textfield for those. But for items that are meant to have only 1 entry from a list, I’d like to see this option coming back and sync it as a list in Scrivener.

I hope you’ll agree and reintroduce this option.

Thanks,

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This was changed because we added to additional ability to sync relationships with keywords in Scrivener. Unfortunately the keywords do not give the same ability to be able to limit one relationship for an item, and therefore we changed all relationships to allow multiple entries in Aeon Timeline.

We may consider in the future if there is a way to improve this so you can sync lists when it is the better option.

Hi Jess, and thanks for your response.

A “quick fix” could be as easy as a checkbox to define if a Relationship item is expecting a single entry or multiple entries. If it’s a single entry, then it can easily be synced as a list in Scrivener as in AT2. If multiple entries are allowed, then sync will stick to a textfield since Scrivener doesn’t support that.

Or tags, actually, may work better for those multiple items lists. But another limitations is that sync can’t contain both tags or metadata currently. It’s either one or the other. Could be good to allow the user to chose per item if it’s gonna be a tag or a custom field.

Thanks,