2-Way Syncing Linked Records to Same Table

[Scott_Hoek]

Say I have a base with a table that has a parent/child relationship with itself.  Projects with parent/child projects, Tasks with subtasks, Contacts with links to a fiance or manager – there's a lot of use-cases for linking a record to another record in the same table.  The problem I'm running into is that two-way sync doesn't allow you to edit linked records to the same table.

Linked records in two way sync is so great, and it fixed soooooo many things in my workflow – but I can't figure this one out.  Links to the same table are not editable in the target base as far as I can tell, but I really really want to be able to make changes to parent/child relationships in a target base.

The only way around this I've been able to think of is to make a second table to handle the relationship, probably like this:

It's a little ugly in the data view, but it works well enough in interfaces in the target if you use a view and not a field:

This approach works fine, except for where it doesn't.  Here are the main issues:

• It only works if the relationship is hierarchical (parent/child) – if I wanted to have 2-way link that isn't a hierarchy, such as a "fiance" column in a contacts table, the way I'm handling the interface wouldn't work because there's effectively two fields and the Fiance could be in either one.  Bad UX.
• We lose the ability to drag items into their parents in list views like we can with a true link to the same table
• We lose the power of date dependancies which do not work with lookup fields, which makes my workaround pretty much a non-starter for tasks/subtasks or similar workflows.

Anyone have any thoughts for other workarounds that could handle these problems better?

[Eric_L]

Short of text fields editable by automation only that act as a relationship manager, I can't think of another solution. I think what you have is the most efficient and clear.