Could I have an explanation of why we can't hide the primary field?

[ripwit]

I have read many responses that said this is a no-no but no one says exactly why. Yes, I know it is the first field - so what? Yes, I know that it is how other linked records get to it , but that doesn’t mean it needs to be visible in all the grids, forms, etc.

Most of my primary fields are composed of bits and pieces of the record and are by themselves ugly and not useful to someone looking at a view. I usually shrink them down to the 50+pixels that I’m allowed to.

Just, please, tell me why this is the case.

Love most everything else in the heavy use I’ve given it during my trial.

[Thomas_Jaccino]

Here is an example base with some items renamed, but the “schema” is still intact. I wanted to have a way to keep track of budgeting for a department, so I made this base. With this setup, you can enter new Line Item records without affecting the budget, and just have the records there for reference. They do not get calculated into the budget until you associate them with a project. When you add them to the project, the assumption is that the quantity specified in the line item for the project is the number you must have in order to have the project be completed once, and then the quantity you use in the Project table multiplies that number again by the number of times you wish to complete that project. It is all summarized in the Departments table where you can see what the asset expansion and operating costs are for each department, and at the bottom of the window, you have a nice summary in the form of a total cost for the entire organization.

In my opinion, the best use of Airtable is to build tools.

[Noel_Howell]

Just a side-bar here that you absolutely CAN access the unique record ID that Airtable applies to every record. In a new field of type formula just enter RECORD_ID() and then the column populates with the Airtable ID. Useful if you are feeding data in/out with webhooks too!

Also-- there’s a field type of ‘Auto Number’ which will uniquely number your records. Unfortunately it starts at 1 with no option to adjust that or go with ‘01’ etc but at least you can use this field in a formula to create a Unique record identifier.

[Henry_Greer]

This would allow us to have a unique id referenced in relationships and still hide the id field! Thanks for this!!!

[Kerry_Kriger]

Airtable should allow users to hide the primary field. There is no valid reason to prevent this.

[Pierre-Louis_Fi]

I've found a workaround to hide the content of Primary Filed in read-only view for my external clients.
The trick is to create a new base, and sync the table you want to share.
On the synced table in the new base, you'll get the same Primary Field. 
BUT, for some reason, you can change the TYPE of this field. 
By choosing "Date", for example, since me primary field is not a date, the Primary Field will now be EMPTY. 
I just found this trick that now allows me to use shareable view & Interfaces in order to share records to my external clients without sharing the Primary Field (that contains unwanted information for my client)

Hope it could be some people around here!
Pierre-Louis