How to sort groups?

[Brien_John]

Hello! I have a question here.

I use Zapier to integrate Airtable and Facebook Messenger as a way to maintain my customer support. Messages sent to my Facebook Page will be created as records in an Airtable table.

Here’s what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/zRsho7J.png

As you can see, messages are always sent back and forth, so I group the records by Sender. But as the messages start to pile up, I want to have the latest messages (or the groups with the latest messages) to be on top of the table. However, if I sort the records, they will only be sorted within the groups, and groups are sorted by Sender alphabetically.

Is there any suggestion to do this?

[Alexey_Gusev]

Hi,

You can do it using linked table with senders, if you are able to maintain linking new records to existing (or create if newsender ). Thus, you can create rollup with latest time in senders table, get it as lookup field here and use to group.

[Brien_John]

Hi @Alexey_Gusev do you mean I have to create tables for each sender? It’s impossible because this customer support is made for random users which can be a million. It’s like any random user will just drop a message to your Facebook Page.

[Alexey_Gusev]

Nope, a single empty table, list of senders. primary field - Name, second field - link to first table.
then turn to table 1, copy-paste whole sender column into linked field
then turn to t2, you’ll get a list of all senders, create rollup to get last date
then in t1 add it as lookup and group by it

But that will work if new records will be supported by links(many ways to do it). Or you copypaste field each time when you need to sort by date.
it’s quite complex for just another type of sort. but you can use this connection for a number of further actions

[Brien_John]

Thank you! That works for the existing records. And I tested it by adding new records in t1, it still works. However, I still have difficulty understanding how lookup and rollup function. Could you tell me how you come up with the answer? I think I miss some kind of systemic thinking here.

[Alexey_Gusev]

in short,
linked field - links 2 tables, visible in both, links created in first, reflected in secondd.
lookup field - field, relying on link field, reflects records from 2nd linked table to 1st table
rollup - “advanced lookup”. lets you apply the formula to all the links in linked field.

https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042807233-Rollup-field-overview