Marking completion status on a linked record

[n0r1_]

I’m trying to create a weekly meal planning base (and app? Just starting with the base so far). For each week, I’d like to choose several recipes to make from a Recipes table, and I’d like to be able to check them off as I go.

Linking multiple recipes is easy — this would just be a “link multiple.“ What’s not as obvious to me is how I might indicate completion status for each one.

So far, I’ve ended up making another table called “Days,” in which each record has a link to a recipe and a checkbox for completion. Then I link multiple days in the week, instead of linking the recipes directly.

The problem is that this gets pretty complicated when I just want to quickly plan a week. Can I work around this with clever app design? (Hi, I’m new here! 👋🏻) Or should I be approaching the base design differently?

Thanks!

[PedroCerrano]

Welcome! I'm a recent addition myself and have found the community here to be spectacularly helpful!

I read you asking two different questions:

1. How do you configure the checkbox for completion in the setup you built?
2. Is there a better way to build/design the app?

I don't understand enough about your app to comment on how to build it differently. If you're willing please share more, and I would expect someone to chime in.

As for the checkbox, there are a lot of ways to accomplish this, but it all depends upon what you want to do. If it were me, I would leverage Airtable's automations or scripts to "do something" when I check a box. That something might be to unlink a recipe. It might be to set up a Single Select field to change the status. Etc.

Because there's so many things you could do, would you be able to provide more info about what you're building?

[n0r1_]

Happy to provide more info 🙂 It might be easiest to describe my current janky system that I’d like to replace with a shiny (and more functional) Airtable.

Right now, at the beginning of each week, I make a new iPhone note with ideas of what I’d like to cook during the week, as a checklist — example note:

This is working well enough, but I’d like to get all my recipes into a database, so I can do fancy things like searching by ingredient, or easily seeing when I last made a recipe. 

That said, the weekly iPhone-note interface is working well for me. I don’t need day-by-day granularity; I would like to check off recipes as I make them.

Does that help?

Thanks again!

[PedroCerrano]

It does help, thank you! There are many ways to handle this. Here's my recommendation...

The developer in me would create a Button Field to run a script Extension (or a checkbox field to run an automation) that would create/update a timestamp of a Formula field, and then configure the view to sort the list from oldest (at the top) to most recent (at the bottom). That way, you'd be inclined to use recipes you hadn't used in a while.

This is a bit more involved, but you're here at Airtable looking for something more involved, right? 😉 It's all very doable because of how approachable Airtable is, and there are tons of resources to help you figure this out. Let me/us know how we might help!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Having a new table where each recipe is a single record so that you can mark it as completed sounds right.  Perhaps you could make it easier to create stuff with an Interface + automation?

Here we mark out which recipes we want to make this week, and once we do that we click the 'Plan recipes' button

This triggers an automation that'll create records in the table "Weekly Recipes" (where you'll mark the completion of the recipe), and it'll all the records you previously marked out and clear the initial checkboxes