May 29, 2017 11:05 PM
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!
Apr 07, 2018 10:24 PM
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.)
Apr 08, 2018 01:06 AM
If I understand correctly what you want I think it can be done with a Batch update Block. Something like this
Apr 08, 2018 01:19 AM
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.
Apr 08, 2018 01:44 AM
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?
Apr 09, 2018 01:28 AM
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.
Oct 13, 2018 11:58 PM
@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?
Nov 01, 2018 10:32 PM
Sorry, as far as I know my answer is no to both questions.
Nov 03, 2018 06:00 AM
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.
Oct 08, 2020 06:41 PM
Strikes me that we can now automate batch update with an automation. Problem solved. Fantastic. Thanks, Gonzalo!