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Emulate an outer-join in a View?

Topic Labels: Base design
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M_M1
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

How might one emulate an outer-join in a View? Example, I want my base to store recipe info in 3 tables; Recipes, Steps, Step Details. One Recipe has many Steps. One Step may have many Step Details.

The Recipes table has fields like Recipe Name, Description, Prep Time.The Steps table has fields like Procedure. The Step Detail table has fields like Ingredient, Quantity, Measure.

Since the Page Designer block must be based on only 1 table, I tried creating a view based on Step Details to lookup fields from Recipes and Steps. Problem: if there is a Step with no associated Step Detail (ie. no ingredients), then that Step does not show up in the view!

It seems that if your table structure is more than 2 tables deep, you cannot pull all needed fields together in one view. I am currently evaluating Airtable as a platform for much larger projects. If the above is correct, that is a deal-killer. Suggestions anyone?

Tig

2 Replies 2
Zollie
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

Without using the API, you can use Advanced Linking. So far I think it’s sufficient for your use case, but you might want to rig one up because there are feature limitations.

Unfortunately, using Lookup fields result in concatenated values from the child table. However, I did not explore the API you referenced which seems promising. Thank you for making me aware of that and also for the fast reply.