My team is using AirTable as a CRM and a Business Development tool.
We have a Projects Table, which tracks current and prospective projects in our pipeline, and a Meetings Table, which tracks our meetings with current and prospective clients in our pipeline. These two tables are linked since Meetings are typically associated with a Project, and Projects may require several Meetings throughout the course of the project.
We have an Action Items table to track follow-up tasks. Action Items have a Description, an Assignee, a Status, a due Date, etc... Action Items may arise from Meetings, but they also may arise from Project/Pipeline tracking activities, so we want to be able to link Action Items to both the Meetings table and the Projects table.
However, when we want to add a new Action Item inline for a row in the Projects table or the Meetings table, we always want to create a NEW Action Item. We DON'T want 'Find an existing Action Item" to pop up because that's really not how Action Items work. A Project may have many Action Items; a Meeting may have many Action Items associated with it; but an Action Item really is a standalone thing and should really only be associated with ONE Project and/or ONE Meeting so searching for an existing one really doesn't make sense, and it's confusing for our team members.
On the Action Items table, I disabled "Allow linking to multiple records" for Project column and for Meetingss column which ideologically should mean that you can't link an Action Item to multiple Projects... BUT on the Projects Table, when creating an Action Item, it still prompts you to search and find existing Action Items, and it DOES allow you to link an Action Item to multiple things.
As of now, to get rid of the 'find existing Action Items search," I set up a view on the Action Items table that's empty, and I'm using the "Limit record selection to view" option on the Action Items column in the Projects and Meetings tables, so that at least no existing items show up in the "Find an existing Action Item" search... but that seems pretty hacky and cumbersome to have an empty view solely for that purpose. Is there a better way to do this.
Essentially, we want a one-directional one-to-many relationship between Projects -> Action Items and a one-to-many relationship between Meetings -> Action Items, but a one-to-one relationship between Action Items -> Projects and Action Items -> Meetings. Is something like that possible?
