Help

Design question: a citation field with page numbers

Topic Labels: Base design
Solved
Jump to Solution
2972 2
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Y_K
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

I have a “citation” field for my “article” record, an article may refer to several citations, e.g. Book A, p.57 and Book B, p.327.

Obviously I also have a “Books” table with book name and published year, author etc.

But I don’t know how to associate “page number” easily with the selected book. Must I create another table linking Article, Book and page number? This would be the obvious way in traditional database design and you would create a UI to simplify the book/page number selection. However in Airtable it would be a multi-step process for the user: select Citation field, create Add+, select the book, add page number, then close the book-page record, then close again. Could this process be simplified so the user only has to select the book and add page number in one action?

image

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
gwynn_kruger
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Try removing the Citation field from Article and instead make it a table:

image

Your user needs to specify the books in a separate table and then specify the articles. Once those are done you add your citations for each article. It should be a decent user experience especially considering the copy-and-paste features of the grid.

You could also create another view to group by articles:

image

See Solution in Thread

2 Replies 2
gwynn_kruger
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Try removing the Citation field from Article and instead make it a table:

image

Your user needs to specify the books in a separate table and then specify the articles. Once those are done you add your citations for each article. It should be a decent user experience especially considering the copy-and-paste features of the grid.

You could also create another view to group by articles:

image

Thanks – that’s actually what I have done (create the citation table linking the other two tables) but the user has difficulties adding an association. I guess this is the only way unless I design an external UI to help simplify the data input.
Thanks for the answer!