While this isn’t really satisfactory, here’s what I’m doing for now which at least enables me to move on to the next step, despite a jury-rigged style intermediary…

I have two single-select fields rather than one – with the first value in each dropdown indicating a type of categorically specific “null” – in essence, allowing me to refer to the alternate field containing the other dropdown. Not really elegant, but good enough for now.

PS - But AirTable Support Staff, please don’t count this as “solved” ! LOL :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

This Functionality is not possible with Airtable. There are some work arounds but they are fragile. I would send Airtable support an email to let them know you want this type of cascading/dynamic filtering functionality.

As someone here already pointed out, dynamic dropdowns are actually a thing as of recently, I’ve been using them for a while to teach regex to colleagues by breaking up a long regex patterns across numerous fields. Some exotic scenarios even allow you to load code via field names and are the only aspect of the solution that I’d describe as “fragile”, presumably because they were never meant to be used in such fashion.

Would you mind pointing us to a demo or example of this feature? What was the recent change that facilitated this functionality?

The base is client’s property so can’t share it without explicit consent. This should be enough to get you going, though, just consider the following way of populating fields:

the end result looks the same like just writing [0-9] into a single-line field, (times however many records you might have), right?

But here’s the real reason we’re doing it this way: modular regex invocations:

I found this approach to result in significantly easier debugging tasks and maintenance (this is part of a natural language processing pipeline with a data-to-text component, meaning things real crazy, real fast, and I need to be able to make sense of hundreds of fields at a glance) than relying on 50-line formulas, regardless of whether you’re inputting them directly or importing from an IDE.

The field names aren’t the most revealing in this example, but this particular setup started as an attempt to write (and teach) regex without having to fiddle with the claustrophobic formula field but while still getting real-time results.

The nested logic also works with both short and long text fields, as well as choice-based fields and links (it just outputs their visible string values to plaintext). The interpolation is pretty limited, however, and trying to drill deep into the concept will probably result in you slamming headfirst into a wall of technical debt.

For heavy - or rather: heavier - interpolation with acceptable performance (assuming that is what you’re really after), look no further than the scripting block/app itself. All you really need to internalize to get started is that:

let test = '## hello, airtable' + " and $goodbye"
let aloha = `${test}`
output.markdown(aloha)

… would output an h2-level subheader like this:

hello, airtable and $goodbye

Grave accents/backticks `` and the ${} template literal form that utilizes them are the key to making it work in this context. Because everything between the curly brackets gets evaluated on the condition that the result is returned as a string. Scaffolding prototypes this way is much quicker than fiddling with a bajillion dynamic fields but good luck debugging extra whitespaces in the scripting block at 5am, or so I hear.

2025 Update:

You can now successfully do this by using Airtable’s dynamic filtering feature and matching the same field types between 2 tables.

If you’re trying to add this feature to a form, note that this requires you to set this filtering feature at the FIELD LEVEL (i.e. for your entire base), instead of just setting it at the FORM LEVEL (i.e. just for your specific form).

It is often easier & better to do this with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

With Fillout, you can leave all your fields alone in Airtable, and just setup a form that has this dynamic filtering feature.

Fillout is 100% free, and it lets you update existing Airtable records with a form or create new records in Airtable.

You can use Fillout’s dynamic filtering features to filter your linked record fields to only show the user the linked records that you want them to see, based upon other data.

Fillout also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to update an existing Airtable record, and create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Make a static (direct) reference to a dynamic field, instead of making a dynamic reference (indirect) to a static field.

The workaround for INDIRECT is dynamically pulling the value using the switch function, preferably using an intermediate field. The switch function could be dependant on the value of the dropdown.

See my example here.

I know its late, but I hope it'll help someone else.