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I’ve spent weeks trying to understand how to properly manage linked record fields in my base, and I’m still stuck. No thanks to ChatGPT - total waste of time. I should have come here a lot earlier.

 

Here’s what I’m struggling with:

 

  • I have one main Entities table that contains artists, labels, distributors, producers, etc.

  • In other tables (like Songs and Releases), I need to link to Entities in multiple ways (for example: Artist, Featured Artist, Label, Distributor, Producer).

  • Every time I create a separate link field for each role (e.g., “Artist Name,” “Label”), Airtable automatically creates a new reciprocal field in Entities, which results in multiple “Songs” or “Releases” columns there. This clutters the Entities table and makes it impossible to keep clean.

 

When I delete these extra reciprocal fields in Entities, it turns my original link fields in Songs or Releases into single line text, breaking everything.

 

What I want to understand is:

 

  1. How can I set this up so I can have different roles (Artist, Label, Distributor, etc.) linked to Entities, but avoid ending up with multiple duplicate columns in the Entities table?

  2. Is there a supported or recommended architecture (e.g., a junction table with a role field) to handle this in Airtable without creating redundant fields?

  3. How do I avoid destroying link fields when I remove or hide these reciprocal fields?

 

I’ve read many articles and tried many suggestions, but I’m honestly lost at this point. I just want a clean, supported way to manage this without risking losing or corrupting my links again.

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Not sure if you still need help or not but:

How can I set this up so I can have different roles (Artist, Label, Distributor, etc.) linked to Entities, but avoid ending up with multiple duplicate columns in the Entities table?

I don’t think this is possible if you want to create a direct link I’m afraid.  For what it’s worth, I think the way you had it set up initially makes sense and I’d do it the same way actually.  To handle the extra fields I would rename them to be ‘Songs - Artist’, ‘Songs - Label’, etc so that I know what each linked field was doing

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Is there a supported or recommended architecture (e.g., a junction table with a role field) to handle this in Airtable without creating redundant fields?

To me, doing it the way you were doing it was the right way.  If you needed to store extra details per link then a junction table would be useful, but it doesn’t seem like you’re doing that in this case

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How do I avoid destroying link fields when I remove or hide these reciprocal fields?

This isn’t possible I’m afraid.  When we create links to other tables then these reciprocal fields will get created, and deleting them will lose the link

 

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