Linked Records are Out of Order for Filtered View

Hey ​@Schmendrick,

Do remember that each view on your table will have its own (i) sorting, (ii) filtering, and (iii) grouping conditions. This means that if you are making reference to two DIFFERENT views, you will want to check that both have the same sorting condition/configuration.

Does that make sense? Please feel free to send over a couple of screenshots as that would help further understand your issue!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

When 2 or more records are created within the same second, Airtable doesn’t know how to properly sort them because Airtable can’t tell which one came first.

The best way to handle this is to create an autonumber field in the linked table (BEFORE creating the records), and then sorting by the autonumber field.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hopefully these attached images clarify the situation - I don’t believe either of your suggestions addresses what is going on since there aren’t any configuration-related explanations.

The first image shows some linked records that are entered into my primary Grid View. You can see the order of the linked records (QTag) and you can also see the corresponding number in the 4th column all the way to the right. 

When you look at the second image, this is a View that is created and filtered ONLY by a particular user’s name. I am keeping track of data for different individuals. There is no sorting or grouping implemented for either view. The only filtering is by the name which should not affect the QTag/linked record name.

I have never had this issue in the past, and I have been doing this exact process for about four years. While I can understand how the second commenter’s point could be true, when I create multiple linked records (in separate records) at one time, they always appear in the correct order on the initial view. It’s only when I’m viewing them through a separate filtered view that they are out of order.  

Once again, to repeat what I wrote above, you will need to sort the records in the order that you want.

You are actually experiencing the issue that I previously outlined for you above:

There is no inherent sort order to records in Airtable, but after you filter a view, Airtable still needs to figure out what order to display your filtered records in.

So, after you filter a view, Airtable tries to keep records sorted in the order of their creation time.

(Same exact problem would crop up if you tried to sort a view. If 2 or more of the sorted records contain the same exact value for the sorted field, Airtable needs to determine a “tiebreaker” to figure out which one of those equally-valued records should be displayed first.)

To see the creation time of your records with the seconds displayed, you can create a formula with this formula:

DATETIME_FORMAT(CREATED_TIME(),'M/D/YYYY hh:mm:ss')

After you create this formula field, you will see that your records are being sorted by creation time.

However, if 2 or more records were created in the same exact second as each other, then Airtable gets confused and it randomly chooses an order for the records that were created within the same second as each other.

The random order is actually determined by the Airtable Record ID, which is a random text string.

You can reveal the record ID by creating a formula field that looks like this:

RECORD_ID()

After you create both of the formula fields that I outlined above, you will see that the sort order is based on the creation time first.

And then, if 2 records have the same exact creation time (including the seconds), the tiebreaking sort order for those 2 records will be determined alphabetically by the record ID string, which is a random string of text.

So, as I mentioned above, the best way to solve this problem is to create an autonumber field, and do a secondary sort by the autonumber field.

The other way to solve it is to make sure that there is always a 1-second delay between creating records (whenever you are creating multiple records).

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

There is no guaranteed order of records when they unsorted. Of course, ‘order of unsorted’ exists for each view, and at the beginning, it matches the order of record creation. But if you try to sort records by any field, and then just disable sorting, records will not reorder back, they staying in the same order as they were sorted last time. But in other view, their sorting depends on how they were last time sorted or created in that view. 
So, to temporary fix your issue, you can enable/disable sorting in your filtetred view.
But in general, if the sorting important to you, use sorting. Create additional columns for that, if needed. Relying on ‘unsorted order’, can cause fail any time, maybe in next 4 years or maybe in a few days.