An option to require Unique Values for any given field

Hey Airtable! It looks like you still haven’t done anything about this- this is absolutely necessary if I’m going to be able to use you long term! I’ve been strongly considering paying for a subscription with you after the free trial ends because so far I’ve been so very impressed with your product! …except for this.

Seriously, this will end up being a deal breaker. I have to be able to enforce unique record values for my key fields, and I’d really rather not just make everything refer to an inscrutable auto-incrementing number.

Please take notice of this thread, and act on it SOON!

Agree!

Given that you want your whole org +100 people in Airtable you will have a need for this function in some crucial tables.

This is a Must!
Why isn’t Airtable adding this feature? Is there some architectural flaw preventing implementing this?

Please provide some feedback on this, as this is a dealbreaker for me (currently paying customer) - will have to switch to another solution.

Adding my voice to this. I have a table of clients with a “client code” column where I’d like to enter a unique 3-letter code for each client. This is typed manually, but I need an alert if the code is already in use.

This is a must have small companies with not resources to hire a developer or skills to use access or filemaker, should have a way to prevent duplicated records there are many situations where simple forms required deduplicate like job applications, permit records, receipts, employee ids, etc etc, should not be that hard to code for a airtable talented developers

This is absolute essential for us as well. We would love to have an option where it won’t allow us to enter a duplicate value in the primary field which is a text field in our use case.

Please airtable support make this happen! Thanks!

Adding my voice to this.

Yikes, this should absolutely be here

A feature that is essential i would say. Voted

Has anybody seen a response from Airtable on this issue? I just started evaluating Airtable and was super excited about how easy it was to create what I wanted until I ran into this issue.
How can they sell this as a “relational database” without this feature?

I agree. Please fix!

+1 for this feature!

+1 for this request!

+1 we need this and all people that are using this.

+1 for unique primary field aka Primary Key – Optional is fine – read more below

Obviously, if this was added at this point, would have to make it an option ELSE it could blow up existing solutions. That’s fine. Adding as an option is great, and default being off is even fine. And if adding it to primary field, then allow uniqueness to be an option on any field. Please. Pretty please. Really. When is this coming?

A bit of a workaround that you could use is using the “Unique” at the bottom of your view. As long as it is “100%”, you know there are no duplicates.

+1 for this request. At a minimum, I’d like to make sure that we’ve not accidentally duplicated order numbers that should be unique. Ideally, with this feature it would at least alert us that there is another entry that matches. Would be helpful for both numbers (most important) and text. Fuzzy logic would be a bonus here so we can be alerted if text entered seems “similar”. Of course, we can do all this manually with grouping and sorting, but with over 10K records that seems like a tremendous waste of time when a computer could do it for us on the fly.

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Just signed on to give AirTable a go and just as quickly have to give up on it. I couldn’t get beyond two tables before I realized there was no true primary key field. In AirTable’s definition of primary field they indicate it should be unique but offer absolutely no way of enforcing said uniqueness.

Is this still not possible?

Not being able to force PK uniqueness makes airtable completely useless.

Unfortunately, you cannot enforce unique values in Airtable itself, but if your data is coming from a form, we’ve built an extension that allows you to prevent duplicates.

adding my +1 to this. Surprised it doesn’t exist :frowning:

I haven’t written it up, but I assume you can write a script in the script block so that when that field is imputed if there is a match in that existing column, it either clears out the field or adds a 1 or something at the end of it.

Would be especially important to have unique formula fields.

For instance, take an “Application” and a “Version” table.
An “Application” field on “Version” links to an “Application” record.
A “Name” field on “Version” describes the version name.

You wouldn’t want to have multiple records combining the Application “Sublime Text” and version “3.2.2” at any given time.

You can see how this is usually achieved in a database like Postgres here.

A way to achieve this in Airtable would be to make a formula such as “RECORD_ID() + " " + Name” and activate a “unique” flag on it.

I am sure the details of such an implementation are complex, but I think the general need for something like this makes sense.

This is certainly a must. I’d love to hear comments from Airtable Team at least.