Pointing two records to each other

[Rachael_Powell]

Hello! I’m building a large editorial calendar for our team and have run into a challenge.

We’d like to be able to point two records to each other. I’m aware of “linking” records but that relationship only goes one way. You can go to Record A and have a column for linking to another record. But if you link it to Record A, Record B appears in that column but if you view Record B, there’s no connection there. I’d like to be able to link both ways easily (without having to manually add Record A to Record B.

The specific use case is that if we have an email newsletter going out, I want to be able to have that as a record, then link that record to all blog posts (individual records) within that row. Then, if I’m looking at an individual blog post record, I’d like to be able to easily see that it was included in the newsletter.

Ideas?

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

What Tables do you have? I would have Newsletters in one table and Posts in another, so the link is reciprocal.

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Rachael_Powell, as @Elias_Gomez_Sainz says, if you have a newsletters table with a link to the posts associated with it:

on the posts table you will see the newsletter for each post:

Does this give you what you want?

JB

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @Rachael_Powell! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: While normally I would agree with @Elias_Gomez_Sainz and @JonathanBowen, I’m not sure that splitting things across different tables would completely solve your problem. Yes, it would make the reciprocal links automatic, but I have a hunch that the reason you have everything in a single table is so that you can make a calendar view that shows everything—newsletters, blog posts, social media posts, etc.—all in one place, as a user in another thread was trying to do recently.

In the end, it’s a catch-22. Multiple tables solves the link problem, but makes creation of a single calendar more challenging. A single table makes a unified calendar easy to create, but means you have to create all links (to records in the same table) manually.

Frankly, I’m not sure why same-table links don’t auto-connect the opposite end like cross-table links do. Perhaps this is something to suggest in the Product Suggestions category.

[Rachael_Powell]

Thank you, all, for your feedback! We could definitely split between tables to solve this but we were hoping to have all of this data live in one table so, as you said, we can easily show it in a calendar view that can show everything, or selected items at will.

I will definitely throw this into Product Suggestions.

All ears if someone has a workaround through formula or something else!

[Justin_Barrett]

Rachael_Powell:

All ears if someone has a workaround through formula or something else!

Formulas can’t create links. The only “something else” I can think of that might work is to use either Zapier or Integromat to create a reciprocal link after you’ve made the first one; i.e. if you link from Record A to Record B, a zap/scenario would somehow pick up on this and create the reverse link from B to A. Depending on the solution chosen, there may be a delay in the creation of the reciprocal link, but it’s the only hands-off solution that comes to mind right away.