Self-linked table

[Sigurdur_Herman]

Hey all, thanks for bearing with me on this one.

I offer referral rewards to clients who refer new clients my way. I’d like to track a) who referred a client and b) who a client has referred. See the screenshot for what I’d like to achieve.

I’d like to make the process a bit simpler by just selecting the “referred by” field, and have the “has referred” field auto-populate with the relationship. So basically, when John tells me that Carl referred him, I want to fill out John’s “referred by” field, and have Carl’s “has referred” field automatically say “John”.

I’ve been fiddling around with this for hours and can’t figure it out even though it seems like it should be simple as dirt. Any clues?

[kuovonne]

Airtable does not create same-table backlink fields when you use a linked record field that links to the same table.

I sell a same-table backlink automation script for using two same-table links in conjunction with each other.

[Sigurdur_Herman]

Thanks for the clarification, at least now I know I wasn’t just being silly! I’m not ready to put a hundred bucks into this project - but good script, very needed!

Does anybody know about a workaround? Since Airtable doesn’t create same-table backlink fields, would this be fixable with a junction table or something like that?

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest flaws in Airtable. Airtable doesn’t offer automatic backlinking within the same table.

I would definitely submit this as a feature request to support@airtable.com, but people have been requesting this for 10 years now, and no improvements have been made on this front.

Your 2 best workarounds for this would be to:

1. Write a custom JavaScript to handle this for you. Two scripts that do this are available here and here, but they are old scripts, so I don't know if they still work anymore.

2. For a no-code way of doing this that doesn't require writing any scripts at all, you can create your own custom automation to create your own backlinks. You may be able to do this with Airtable's automations, now that they have added the ability to "find records" in their automations.

However, I often recommend that people use Make’s advanced automations for Airtable, which gives you much more power & control than Airtable's automations. But there is a very steep learning curve with Make (i.e. it could take days or weeks to learn), which is why I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld