I’m a big fan of look-ups but I would really like to be able to remove records the occur more than one time. Is there a way to do that?
Remove duplicates in look up field
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+6Here to join the party, I’ve also just come across this need. Trying to organise references and research for individual animal species, but view easily overall content within their families.
Having this feature would be the final puzzle piece.
+1 this would solve a lot of issues and prevent the need to use hacky workarounds that aren’t scalable
+1Adam_Minich wrote:
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.
Adding my +1. This feature prevents our organization from really using this as it would be integral to a lot of the tables we would need to create. The current workaround is not feasible at scale.
+1 I’m currently evaluating AirTable and this was an immediately noticeable issue. Seeing how old this thread is, how much activity etc, as well as in other threads of “why-is-this-not-standard?” feature requests, I’m beginning to seriously doubt this product.
+1 Adding my name to the list, as well as everyone over in this thread: How can I make a lookup field show only unique results? - #22 by Karlstens
+1 from me too - need this, cant believe it doesnt already have this function and only just realised all my counts were incorrect
+10David_Krizan wrote:
I personally am trying to get a rollup of unique values, as the duplicates have no value as links.
This is not my particular use case, but let’s use a simpler recipe example…
There’s a Recipes table with linked tables called “Ingredients” and “Type”.
Ingredients has the following values:
- Chicken
- Bacon
- Lettuce
- Onions
- Walnuts
- Cheese
- Bun
Type has the following values:
- Fruit
- Vegetable
- Nut
- Meat
- Dairy
- Bread
Using a “Chicken Club Sandwich” example, let’s say we wanted to use a look-up to provide the various food types for this sandwich recipe, the results would be “Dairy, Bread, Vegetable, Vegetable, Meat, Meat”.
Example:
However, “Dairy, Bread, Vegetable, Meat” would be much more useful, as the redundancies are removed. Example of what’s desired:
And here is my proposed solution (having a simple switch under the a Lookup field that links to another Linked Record field):
this would be awesome!!
+6+1 Joining the chorus — I want to display the lookup values in a gallery view, but if they can’t be deduped, it becomes an impossible UX problem! ARGH. Please add this feature!
+14+1 But more broadly need UNIQUE function (so can be used with all kinds of lists). And better array/list functionality would really add a lot of power.
+20Would be good to have this feature implemented in the new year. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:
I appreciate the Automation work-around, but it is a still workaround for what effectively would be considered a missing stock feature by many users.
Adam_Minich wrote:
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.
I’m working really hard to understand this workaround, and I’m close, but not quite there.
Does someone have an example of this somewhere that I can look at the guts of to understand better?
+18You can find duplicates in your records using the On2Air Amplify app in Airtable.
Here’s a quick video how:
And an article:
How to Check for Duplicates in Your Airtable Fields and Records
Add the app directly to your Airtable base:
You can also use our UNIQUE ARRAYS function in the On2Air Actions app
Here’s info on the Unique Arrays function
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