Remove duplicates in look up field

Are you still able to see the “only display unique linked records” option?

I can’t see it when I structure my lookup field. Is it possible they removed this option when they added the conditional lookups?

Can anyone confirm if the option to “only display unique linked records” is still there? Thanks!

Whoops. I thought that was an actual screenshot. I guess I need to read a little more carefully…

I just ran into this problem, too. Hoping to see a solution soon. In them mean time is there a workaround?

Yeah, that was just my mockup of my proposed solution. It would seem like this would be to implement, especially given that they just added conditional filtering to lookup fields. The need for this feature keeps coming up, so it’s frustrating that it hasn’t been addressed yet.

+1 here. It’s my first go at using Airtable and I’m hitting this problem straight from the onset. It seems like a no-brainer to me that the deduplication feature should be implemented.

Absolutely agree that this is an important feature, the mocked up solution by @David_Krizan looks perfect to solve it. Please add support for this Airtable!

Would love to see this implemented! It would solve a lot of issues I’m currently facing. And @David_Krizan’s solution seem perfect to do it :winking_face:

+1 to this solution! Need it right now for a similar situation as the original post.

I need that too :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

+1 to this solution!

+1 to this feature please. The proposed “only display unique linked records” toggle seems like an elegant solution to me.

Although this thread is more than 2 years old and I doubt this issue will be fixed soon, here is my +1

+1 here for me too!!!

What you can do is look back through a rollup function and use the ARRAYUNIQUE(values), aggregation function to get a unique list, but this list is non functional… and if you are like me and want to build this onto a document in the Page Designer block, it will not work as you hoped it would.

+1 for me too! This would be a very interesting feature to implement.

+1 this feature seems necessary.

Airtable folks, please post a workaround here if there is one available. Thanks!

+1 pretty please!! I have the same problem and I can’t find a workaround.

+1. This seems like one of those low effort/high delight features. Seems like an easy win for the product team. Let’s keep this thread fresh!

+1 for me as well! I’ve had multiple use cases where this comes up. Thanks!

I know I posted in this topic before, but I keep running into this annoying problem. Structuring my research database would be so much easier if it wasn’t for this issue. Why would you ever want to have duplicates in a lookup field?

I agree that the Airtable engineers dropped the ball with this one, and sadly, they seem to be unresponsive to user feedback like the comments in this thread.

There is one partial workaround to this dilemma, but it doesn’t provide the full functionality of lookup fields (which have now become clickable items in Airtable):

Would be great to have this feature.

Hello community!

Adam from the Airtable customer support team here. I had an Airtable user reach out with a link to this community post. While I can’t speak to a specific timeframe for when this feature might be available I have a workaround that may help.

I used the Recipe, Ingredients, and food type example from earlier in the thread. Also, you will need to have some comfort with our Automations feature in order to use this method:

Hope this helps and know that our team is very thankful to our community!

P.S. It may make more sense to set up the automation trigger to be “When a record is updated” and have it just watch the “Array Unique” rollup field.

Although it doesn’t resolve the underlying issue, I found this to be very useful.

Thanks for posting!

It IS a workaround, but it’s not very scalable, as creating 3 additional fields and an automation for what is essentially a field-level filter is not a particularly elegant solution. And then good luck trying to explain that workflow to a non-experienced user. The simplest solution is to not make users think or create a Rube Goldberg machine to do something that really should be a no-brainer.

And this also goes for linked records on the same table. Please give us a simple switch to allow the linkage to apply to both records. For example, if I have a Software table and have a same-table linked record field called Integrations, if I use this field to link Airtable to Zapier, I’d want an option (at the field-level) to make this a two-way linkage so that Zapier is also linked to Airtable in this instance.