Automatic Backlinking of Records - Can't get it done

[Davidt]

Hi there. I have a table "business partners" with records of type "supplier" and "brand" which are linked between each other. a record of type "supplier" can be linked to multiple records of type "brand" but a brand can only be linked to one supplier. 

i always want the links to be two way. i.e. if i add the record "Gmail" to the table and link it to the existing record (of the same table) called "Google", i want airtable to automatically identify that there is a missing backlink (ie. record Gmail has "Google" in its "link" field, but record "Google" does not have anything in its link field) and link the record "Google" to "Gmail" automatically. i have an automation that can trigger based on view conditions correctly. i want the automation to trigger, then "find" the linked record (i.e. Google) by ID and then copy whatever existing links are in the "link" field and add "Gmail" to that. However automations refuses to find a record in a table based on the values of a "link" field. even if i add a formula field that outputs the ID of the linked record, automations cannot correctly find the record by ID. how can i achieve this?

[Sho]

Here is a similar topic
I don't think I need Automation, but it seems that pretty much everyone uses it.

https://community.airtable.com/t5/base-design/field-to-show-source-of-linked-field/td-p/158124

[kuovonne]

This situation is a bit different from the one that Sho linked to. In that other thread, it made sense to use same table links because everything in the table was the same type—everything was an organization. Thus, I recommended my same-table-back links script. 

However, in this case, your table is holding two types of things that are not the same: suppliers and brands. In this case, I think you should split the data into two tables, one for suppliers and another for brands. Once you have two tables, you will get links and back links that work automatically. You will also be able to set preferences to say that suppliers can be linked to multiple brands, but each brand should have only one supplier.

[Davidt]

Hm, I consider suppliers and brands to both be instances of "organisations" that are held by the table "organisations", however they are of different types of organisations. Splitting that data into two tables has both advantages and disadvantages. I think with the new List-View it might be possible to get around some of the disadvantages.