Linked lists 🔗

Hey everyone, I'm back with another Delve Updates for you.

Two updates in one week.

It's been a pretty good week.

If you watched the last video you will have caught at the end.

There was a small update to lists and that came along with a promised follow up that we are rolling out some bigger changes to publication lists.

Well, this is that bigger change, so.

But buckle up.

This one's really exciting.

It's a little bit more heady, but it is extremely functional and useful and I think it's going to make your lives a lot easier.

So if you've been using publication lists and editing search settings in Delve, you will probably know by now that there's kind trap you could fall into, let's say with publication lists where you can copy the publications from a list into a search, but when you do that, a kind of like a duplicate version of that list is created that only lives inside of the search.

So if you were to block publications from your tracker and edit these search settings, the original publication list that you had copied would remain completely unchanged.

So what that would result in is as soon as the tracker list or the publication list is edited, those two lists are not the same anymore and they don't reflect each other and they're really not one for one.

And so that's meant that some of you guys have had to be really, really careful about making changes to lists.

You've had to cross reference and kind of keep lists up to date, which is really frustrating and honestly time consuming.

we're creating this new concept called Linked lists which will let you keep lists, in sync wherever you use them so that you don't have to do sort of that like management step Now what I just showed you a second ago was copy from a list, you could also import a CSV of publications, but you'll notice that the new option here is link a list.

And when I click on this I see all of the publication lists There's three, along with kind of a little memo about how this feature works.

So a linked list stays in sync everywhere it's used.

If you block a publication from your search, the list itself will update.

And if you make any edits to the list, the search will also update.

So it's the same list everywhere you're using it.

It's not a copy, it's the exact same artifact.

This also means that if you have the same list linked to multiple different trackers or multiple different searches, those edits made in one tracker will affect the list and it'll change in all the trackers too.

So I'm going to show you how this works.

If I click on this block list, I'm going to go ahead and add that here and you'll see that I've got 256 publications blocked.

I can open the list and see the publications there and I can edit them.

so just as an example, let's take out the first one.

Going to remove that from the publication list.

And now when I go back to the search, it's gone down to 255.

And if I want to unlink this list, I can click this button.

And what happens now is that all those publications are still here in the search.

it just copies them, and basically destroys the relationship between the list and the search.

So now the search is functioning independently from the list and those edits are not going to go both ways anymore.

as a little treat, we've also added some super helpful options, one of which is to clear all the publications from the search.

And the other thing you can do is copy these publications to a new list.

if you want to use this feature on a search that already has publications on it, you will run into this warning which asks you to clear the list of searches first.

So I'm going to go ahead and clear the list so that I can actually sync my new list that I just created here going back to my lists page here, if I go into my block list that I'm using on that search, I can see that there's a little flag at the top which lets me know that this publication list is linked to a search right now.

and if you open that dropdown, you can see the searches that are linked to it.

So now that this feature exists, you'll be able to keep your projects, your trackers and your lists all in sync.

You might want to take a look at the publication list you've been using and try to remove duplicates I highly recommend setting up a linked list and using that on your tracker settings and it will just make your lives easier and it'll make your data and your project set up a lot cleaner.

If you have any questions about this or you need help with your project setup or kind of getting this in use on your project, please reach out to us.

We'd love to help you with that and I hope that this feature brings you great joy and peace of mind.

Thanks so much for watching.

Have an amazing day.

Bye.