Alphabetical Reordering of Linked Items

[Darren_Layne]

I’m wondering if this is possible at present. My use example is thus:

I’m currently organizing the civil parishes of Scotland by county, and therefore linking a table of hundreds of parishes to their home county in a separate table. Aberdeenshire has eighty-six different parishes and I’d like these to show up in both table view and form view alphabetically. I know I can reorder them by dragging each item around, but it would be far more efficient to have them automatically reorder by alphabetization. Is reordering a long list of linked items expressly a manual process?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might have!

[W_Vann_Hall]

FYI, as described in this thread and the demonstration base referenced in the replies, there appears to be a way to impose a manually applied order onto a collection of linked records by way of an autonumber field. (To be honest, enough time has passed since I addressed the ‘next action’ question posed in the thread that I am not sure how broadly or narrowly applicable the proposed solution might be, but I believe it involved similar issues.)

[Gonzalo_Mateos]

If I understand correctly what you want I think it can be done with a Batch update Block. Something like this

[W_Vann_Hall]

As I recall — and I really should go back and review what I did before I get too deeply into this — to ‘re-set’ the order one had to regenerate the autonumber field by changing it to a different field type and then back to autonumber, which can’t be done through the Batch Block.

[Gonzalo_Mateos]

I’ve prepared an example. Before ordering the students (linked field) are not in alphabetical order.

I apply the Batch update Block and I get this

Now the students (their links) are in descending order.
Is this what is required?

[W_Vann_Hall]

Yes, but the second part of the requirement is to enable Airtable to identify which is the first- or last-ranked entry in the list.

[MONKiAIR]

@Gonzalo_Mateos That worked nicely.

(1) Is there any way to have this updated automatically?
(2) I couldn’t apply it to an associated “Look up” field. Any way to do that?

[Gonzalo_Mateos]

Sorry, as far as I know my answer is no to both questions.

[W_Vann_Hall]

The only way to apply it to a lookup field is to create the linked-record field the lookup follows after the records have been sorted. I describe something similar in this reply to another query — but in that case, I had it easy, as the linked records I needed to create all went to the same record in the target table.

[Eli_Kent]

Strikes me that we can now automate batch update with an automation. Problem solved. Fantastic. Thanks, Gonzalo!