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I couldn’t find anything specifically answering this and it may be a dumb question. Within our workspace we have a base that has tables for the various types of common data we use, and that data is synced to its respective databases for each department. The particular table I’m looking at contains common site locations  that are used across the board.

 

These site locations are synced to each respective department. However, each department may have their own unique sites to add. Is it possible to keep the common sites synced and also give each department the ability to  add their own sites to that same table in their respective bases?

Yes and no.

A “destination sync table” can ONLY contain synced records from the “sync source”. There cannot be a combination of “local records” and “synced records”.

However, if you have two-way syncing enabled (available on Business and Enterprise Plans), you can add records into the source base through the destination table.

But those aren’t “local records” that live in the destination. Those new records will be added to the “sync source” (onto the same view that was feeding into the “destination sync table”).

If you don’t have two-way syncing, you can also give the users a form to enter new records into the “sync source” base. You can either use Airtable’s forms, or a more advanced form tool like Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

But whichever approach you choose, all new records will need to be created in the source, because a destination sync table can only contain synced records, no local records.

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


Hey ​@ScottWorld!

What do you think about having multiple Syncing Views from the source, one for each department.

Source table would have Location field (or set of fields) and Department field (single select, or multiple select depending on the use case).

Each view would be filtered to show records where Department field has any of “Generic”, or “Department ABC” (or corresponding specific reference).

If each department creates records on the Source Table through a form, Department field could be set by default to Department ABC (or corresponding specific reference).

Downside to all of this: Having to create a new view for each sync.

Hope this also helps ​@tsullivan!

Feel free to reach out, or schedule a quick call, if you’d like to go through this together.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 


On a Teams plan, I think the only solution is to give people a form to create records in the source table

On Business and above, you can use two way sync for this (https://support.airtable.com/docs/two-way-syncing-in-airtable), but it becomes really easy for your data to get messed up if a lot of people are poking at it, so going the form route might still be advisable, really


I might be SOL then and just have to put the common sites in manually and let each department do what they may from there. There are some privacy laws that prevent us from having sites specific to each department available to everyone as those specific ones may have personally identifying information.


@Mike_AutomaticN 

Yes, that’s exactly what I would recommend! 😃 I was actually assuming that it was already setup that way.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant


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