Automate table linking based on unique identifiers

[Victoria_Read]

I’m wondering if you can help.

I have two tables ‘Vehicles’ (a list of all vehicles, their type etc) and another ‘Bookings’ (dates, booking purpose) that has a linked field to ‘Vehicles’ allowing me to link multiple vehicles to one type of booking (via the primary field, which is a vehicle identifier unique to each vehicle)

Having a separate table for bookings saves me from having to continuously make endless date columns for each new booking.

I need to build an automation that does the following

• Booking Table Recognises when a new record has been created and completed (currently signalled through a manually selected checkbox, easy enough to do!)
• Booking Table Searches the linked field and recognises the vehicles that have been linked
• Vehicle Table Find the records for each of those linked vehicles
• Vehicle Table Link the booking ID to the vehicle record under the ‘Bookings’ Column

Happy to use an extension if that will do the job. Thanks!

[Kamille_Parks · Accepted solution]

Victoria_Read:

Having a separate table for bookings saves me from having to continuously make endless date columns for each new booking.

This is the “correct” way to design your use case anyways, so good instincts there.

Linking two different(*) tables together creates reciprocal Link Fields. That means whenever you update the Link Field in the Bookings table, you are already updating a Link Field in the Vehicle table. Airtable creates and manages the reciprocal links for you, and the field may be hidden from whatever view you’re looking at in the Vehicles table.

Are you saying you need two links between Vehicles and Bookings? If so, the Automation setup would be pretty straight forward but if you only need one link between the tables then you don’t need an Automation at all.

(*) The only time Airtable doesn’t create/handle automatically reciprocal link fields if you link one table to itself.