This may be outright impossible based on how Airtable is designed to be purely dynamic however, I would love to know if anyone has any solutions.
Here’s the Problem:
I am using Airtable as a Series Bible for my Fantasy Book series. It is a massive world with many plots and subplots, characters, themes etc.
As I am writing the scenes and beats, I’m noticing Airtable is not persistent with the sorting of its records. In other words, I set up a series of scenes, then I filter and sort. When I remove the filter and sort, the scenes are no longer in the order they were created. This is maddening, effectively removing the usefulness of Airtable due to it resorting all records.
Furthermore, I am aware of ‘Autonumbering’, however this isn’t much use when you decide to re-organize scenes or add a scene in between two existing scenes. The numbering immediately becomes irrelevant.
How can I maintain the order of my scenes and still use sorting, but rest knowing it will be restored to the default timeline.
Existing strategies are extremely cumbersome; Numbering each scene/beat manually, or setting a time to each scene or beat. This really gets in the way of the process and if I miss setting the number or time once, the record disappears and I have to go searching for it and setting its numbers.
I am looking for a solution to number the record automatically based on its current place in a view. That way I can re-arrange them and the number will update instead of having to update every record, or I can go into a different view/filter/sort without the number changing.
Is this at all possible?