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Alphabetical Reordering of Linked Items

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Darren_Layne
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

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!

18 Replies 18

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.)

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

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.

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

I apply the Batch update Block and I get this
image.png
Now the students (their links) are in descending order.
Is this what is required?

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.

@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
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

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

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
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

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