Automatically add linked records from a source table to a link column

[Andy_Sannier]

I have found a few posts about this already, but none more recent than two years ago. I find this feature gap baffling, and I can’t imagine being able to use Airtable without it.

My use-case is simple. I have an ever-growing list of sign-in for meetings. I want to have a separate membership table that has one row per unique person - a given person will sign in to many meetings - and, for example, a count of the number of meetings that person has attended. This is trivial to do with linked records and Rollup columns. However, as best as I can tell, for each new record in the source sign-in sheet, I have to manually add those linked records to the derived membership table. That is a nonstarter for me, and I have several other use-cases I was hoping to make after this prototype, but they all require this very simple feature.

I don’t understand why a column can’t be set to automatically link to all records in a corresponding table. This is the most basic feature of any relational system. What am I missing?

People have been asking for this feature for a long time, too: Auto Update linked columns
Automatically linking a record from a different table

[ScottWorld]

One easy way to do the manually linking is that you can just start typing in the linked field, and it will keep narrowing down your potential matches until you hit return to accept one of the matches. If there are no matching records, just hit return and it will automatically create a new linked record based on what you just typed.

[Andy_Sannier]

The idea that I have to manually type anything is the issue… I can set up a Google Spreadsheet to automatically fill in results from another sheet, why not an Airtable?

[chrismessina]

I’m with you. I accept form submissions that include an email address. I want to populate a secondary table with these emails as a primary key, but this seems not possible. A linked/replicated column like you suggest would solve my problem AFAICT.

Having to type or copy/paste columns to keep two tables in sync is madness.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Hey @chrismessina,

While it’s not a fully automated solution, I did write a script for the Scripting Block to deal with a similar issue that at least removes the majority of the pain of manually syncing tables. I’m sure it could be adapted to do what you need with the click of a button:

Scripting Block: Link Surveys/Forms Submitted to Contacts Show and tell

The Problem: A common workflow in Airtable is the gathering of Surveys or Forms, and often we want to link multiple surveys or forms submitted by the same person back to a single Contact record for that person. However, exposing Linked Record fields to do this in the public form itself is undesirable because we don’t want form users to see all the names of existing contacts in our base, and it also precludes form users that don’t yet exist in our Contacts table. This leaves us using manual pro…