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Linked Records are currently limited to a single table per column in another table. But I’d like to combine records from 2 or more tables into a single column in an additional table. In other words, polymorphic relationships.

What I’d like to Do
I have a table of Client A’s Products and a table of Client B’s Products. They need to be combined into a Products column on a third table, Employee Assignments. Both product tables store data very differently, so combining them into a single table would result in an excessively wide and long Products table. Instead, the two client tables are left as is, and the Employee Assignment’s “Products” column is made polymorphic to accommodate both clients’ data.

Workaround
Barring added features, I can create a junction table of Clients Products where each client gets their own column. The problem is that Clients Products will inevitably become pretty wide as lookups & formulas are added over time. Each client products table will require their own columns for the linked product and lookups. And there will need to be a number of formulas to combine those products & lookups before passing them neatly along to Employee Assignments.

I have this same problem. I’m a stylist, and have a separate table for each category of clothing, but need the outfit table to pull from several clothing categories into the same cell.field. I can’t put all clothing categories into the same table because 1) I track different characteristics and 2) it needs to stay on the free plan because I share these editable tables with clients. To combine all categories into one table would both confuse clients and also go over the 1200 row limit.

This would also be very useful for me. I would like to create a table listing tasks aggregated from other tables. Since there are different kinds of tasks, they don’t all fit onto the same table. Having a separate lookup field for each type of tasks would make for way too many columns in the aggregated table, most of which would be blank for any given record. It would get much worse if I tried to use a rollup.

I second this request. Would make Airtable even more powerful, imho.

@Zollie breaks it down perfectly - let’s make this request a reality!

Yes, I now need this, as well! I now track physical assets over multiple films, but would like to keep each film in it’s own table (because the info is SO different for each, and the amount of saved views I need for each film individually, let alone across all films). If I combine all the assets together in one table, I would have SO MANY saved views that it would be ridiculous (individual films and studio wide).


The only reason I need to combine the movie assets together for is activities and events that the assets go to collectively to represent the studio’s work. I would love to have 1 base, with a table for each film, and then have a separate table called “Activities and Events” where I can link assets from any film table to “go” to an entry in the activity/event table. So far, when I have attempted this, it starts adding asset entries to every film table if I link it to an event. Meaning, now in my table for Film 1, I suddenly have assets from Film 4 showing up at the bottom of Film 1’s table because they were linked to the same event in the Event table together!!!


Sorry, I just explained the same thing in a more complicated way, but I am screaming inside right now because this literally just happened this morning and I’m trying to figure out the best way to proceed. I can’t have the linked records from other films muddling up my individual film tables.


So, you can link them, technically, but then they start to populate your other tables where they don’t belong! If I’m doing something wrong, I sure can’t find any info on how to do it correctly…

Yes please!!! I was thinking about something like this today. As a bridal/special occasion fashion designer, I have issues like @Mary_Williams does. I am building my materials, trimming inventory base. I also will have my database for creating my designs “projects” I assume, that needs to pull from my “inventory”, as well as clients info, measurements and that also needs to pull depending on if it is one of my made to measure or a custom gown. I am still planning all of this out in my head/on paper so that I am not redoing it a million times. Trying to pull some of what I want from a garment manufacturing database I found that is amazing, especially for designers, it is just way more that I need. I also want to schedule social media and keep up with that. I am hoping that Airtable will end up being what I need so I don’t have to think about building an Access database, even though I just paid $99.00 to buy MO 365 ughh. Enough bable…I hope something like this suggestion will go through…

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