Alphabetical Reordering of Linked Items

It is manual right now. You can do it via API; though straight-forward, you’d need to download all the data from other tables, so you can sort the link IDs.

For the order in the form, I think you just need to sort the first grid view of the parishes table. Then parishes will appear sorted in the form.

Thanks for your input, Alexander. Sorting the grid view doesn’t appear to change anything. Attached is a capture of the table; note that the parish names aren’t in alphabetical order within their respective fields (each parish is linked to a record in a different table). Likewise, they show up in the displayed order within form view. It would be great to have an option for alphabetizing large numbers of linked items in this way.

I have the same problem. I can’t get the linked items to sort in the view.

Struggling with the same problem :frowning:

I’m creating a table for a school and when the kids names are unsorted there is no simple way to check attendance.

@Darren_Layne, have you looked at using Parishes as your main table, grouped by County and sorted by Parish?

Thanks for the suggestion, @Christoff. This does indeed allow me to look at the parishes in alphabetical order, but only from grid view. Ideally I would like them to appear in alphabetical order in record view, as this is eventually how our users will be looking at the data. In record view, I could go through each county and resort them alphabetically by hand, but it seems to me it would be a great feature to have a single-button sort available in record view, much like the Customize Field Type option for each column.

I am having a similar issue, although I want to automatically reorder by date. I’ve been building a base for a small family foundation consisting of two main tables - “Organization” and “Grants”. Each entry in the Grants column is linked to an Organization record. I’d like the grants to appear in chronological order so when I open the Organization record the newest grants appear first. I know I can do this manually, but many Organization records have over 100 grants in them. The other odd thing is that most of the linked records ARE in chronological order. Why is that not the case for all of them? Any help is much appreciated!

I too would like items shown in a link field to be sorted - there should be an option to choose how to sort.

Yeah so it seems linked records are ordered by their creation date in the table that is being linked to by default. No current solution besides reordering them manually.

This should be a priority for Airtable because it affects their paid features as well such as the Page Designer block. When I am creating a report of expenses I can’t automatically sort them by date so to organize the report for my clients I have to manually rearrange the records so that they display correctly in the Page Designer report.

FYI, as described in this thread and the demonstration base referenced in the replies, there appears to be a way to impose a manually applied order onto a collection of linked records by way of an autonumber field. (To be honest, enough time has passed since I addressed the ‘next action’ question posed in the thread that I am not sure how broadly or narrowly applicable the proposed solution might be, but I believe it involved similar issues.)

If I understand correctly what you want I think it can be done with a Batch update Block. Something like this

As I recall — and I really should go back and review what I did before I get too deeply into this — to ‘re-set’ the order one had to regenerate the autonumber field by changing it to a different field type and then back to autonumber, which can’t be done through the Batch Block.

I’ve prepared an example. Before ordering the students (linked field) are not in alphabetical order.

I apply the Batch update Block and I get this

Now the students (their links) are in descending order.
Is this what is required?

Yes, but the second part of the requirement is to enable Airtable to identify which is the first- or last-ranked entry in the list.

@Gonzalo_Mateos That worked nicely.

(1) Is there any way to have this updated automatically?
(2) I couldn’t apply it to an associated “Look up” field. Any way to do that?

Sorry, as far as I know my answer is no to both questions.

The only way to apply it to a lookup field is to create the linked-record field the lookup follows after the records have been sorted. I describe something similar in this reply to another query — but in that case, I had it easy, as the linked records I needed to create all went to the same record in the target table.

Strikes me that we can now automate batch update with an automation. Problem solved. Fantastic. Thanks, Gonzalo!