Field linking to records from multiple tables

[ben_kilgore]

I have one table of bugs for Software A. Software B, with its own table of bugs, depends on software A to some small extent. Sometimes bug blockers for Software B are in the Software B table, but sometimes they’re in Software A. I need a field which can accept either. Is this possible? It seems a field can only link to records in one table, not many. But this can’t be true, can it? It’s a pretty basic function.

I am aware that the preferred way to deal with this is to contain all these entries within one table and use views to differentiate, but it really doesn’t make sense in this case. In fact, these softwares are so different that I had them in separate bases, until I realised that there was no way to access the data (prior to sync) from one base in another.

These records also have very different fields, so if I were to represent them in one table, I’d have extraneous fields for all the records.

[ScottWorld]

Sounds like you need to create a many-to-many relationship. You can learn more about that here:

Airtable - Support

Airtable's guide to many-to-many relationships

What sets Airtable apart from ordinary spreadsheet applications is its ability to link related concepts together. Knowing how to represent the relationships between different groups of objects can ...

[ben_kilgore]

Thanks for the reply. It seems like a junction table might be the way to go–I need a table which contains all the records from two or more other tables from which to pull the record from. I am still a bit foggy on how to accomplish this, but I expect it uses a formula to fill itself with instances/copies of records from each of the source tables. Is this the right way?

[Standifordwalsh]

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