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Hello!

I’m working on moving our team into an interface for a better UI experience (and for more control on what is seen and editable). We currently have our work split among two tables (actually there is also a need to connect a completely separate base, but one problem at a time).

Is there a way for me to have dates from both tables in one single calendar view that I could have as an interface page? The tables have a parent (projects) and child (tasks) relationship where the tasks are linked to the project record. However, not every project has a connected task.

Can I build this with lookup tables and formulas and automations?

Unfortunately Calendar views can only take data from a single table at this point, and so your best bet’s going to be attempting to create a table that has all the data

Perhaps you could try an automation that’ll trigger whenever a new record’s created in the ‘Projects’ table, and its action will be to create a new record in the ‘Tasks’ table and link itself to it.  The Tasks table would then contain both the Project and Task records, and then you’d use a formula field to consolidate it for the calendar display:

The downside to this is that now you can’t drag and drop the dates in the Calendar view.  You can get around this by getting the automation that creates the record to also paste the ‘Date’ value into the ‘Due Date' field, and after that you’ll need to set up another automation to make sure that whatever updates you make to a Project’s ‘Due Date’ value in ‘Tasks’ gets synced back over to the Projects table

Hopefully someone else has a better idea!

Hey ​@ScottPhillips,

As mentioned by Scott above, this is currently not possible. A couple of months ago Airtable released the automatic backlink when linking one table to its own -which means that theoretically you could easily have just one table that will hold both Projects and Tasks. In this way you could easily have everything under one calendar.

However… that would probably not be ideal from a database architecture perspective. (This might depend on how many different fields and workflows each of Project and Tasks has. If your base is really lean then maybe you can make it work).

In addition to Scott’s solution above -which is probably the one I’d use if I’d like to have Airtable as my hub, I could suggest:
Sync each of you different views to your Gmail or Outlook calendar.
You can sync as many tables and views as you want. They would be split up in Airtable, but combined in Gmail Calendar.
Check out this Airtable support article for a step by step guide.

Feel free to grab a slot using this link if you’d like us to go through this together on a brief call!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thanks Adam--this makes sense. I'm about 75% there, but cannot seem to get that final automation to work. Where I’m trying to change the date on the original project record in the “projects” table by editing the date on the duped project record in the “tasks” table. The automation keeps showing an error. ​@TheTimeSavingCo 

Hm could you provide a screenshot of the error you’re getting?  Here’s an example I setup and you can duplicate it to your own workspace to see how it works.  The lookup field has a conditional on it to only show the Due Date value for records with type ‘Project’, and the formula field has this:

IS_SAME(
  {Due Date},
  {Due Date (from Tasks)}
)

 

yeah, that did it ​@TheTimeSavingCo --thanks for sharing your base. And taking it a step further, in order for my calendar view (tasks table) to be useful for moving those project dates around, I can base the calendar on the “task due date,” correct?

Yeap that’s right

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