Groupings listed with one tag versus multiple tags?

[mattster]

Hello, 

I created a table of articles I published on my site.  For each row, I inserted the article title, publish date and various tags.   

I would like to create a view/report so that Airtable presents me with one long report of all my articles organized first by a single tag..and then for each tag category it would sort the articles by date.

Here's what I did:

Using the "Group" feature,  I grouped by "categories" (all my tags)  and then i added a subgroup of Date.

When it showed me the results (see attached), it showed me rows organized not just by a single tag, but multiple tags.  (It seems it's doing that based on how I added multiple tags to the end of a single row in my airtable).

How can I see a long list of all my articles grouped underneath multiple  "single" tags (versus multiple tags)?  

thank you,

Matt

[TheTimeSavingCo]

I don't think you can I'm afraid.  As a workaround, you could convert your multiple select field into a linked field to a new table, and the new table would provide the view you're looking for?

This solution doesn't work, skip to Scott's post next!

[ScottWorld]

@mattster 

The post above suggested that you should convert your multiple select field to a linked record field, but that wouldn’t automatically solve your problem. That would only get you partly there.

To solve your problem, you would need to restructure your database as a “many-to-many relationship”, which is a more complicated type of relationship that requires 3 tables (instead of 1 table or 2 tables) for your record linking.

You can read more about many-to-many relationships in Airtable’s support document here. https://support.airtable.com/docs/understanding-linked-record-relationships-in-airtable

I also give a demonstration of many-to-many relationships on this Airtable podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tXHLU3i5GY&list=PLqssva4liHRwHhQIpTXekG8WObEoyC2F1

p.s. If you need to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Interesting!  I don't understand, could you explain why we would need 3 tables for this? 

[ScottWorld]

He asked for a long list of all the articles underneath each individual tag, yet there could be multiple tags per article. The only way to do this in the grid view would be to create a junction table to handle this.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Ah yes, I see, this would allow the resulting table to have the date per article as well as the grouping!

[mattster]

Thank you, Scott. Not quite sure I'm understanding 100% from your section in the video you submitted. We add new articles every day so it seems like we'd have to add that article title in a row in the 3rd junction table and the list would be really long.  Is this correct?  

The other thought is if I added our article in our table, instead of adding multiple tags at the end of the row, I'd need to replicate the article title and only assign one unique tag at the end of the row.  While this probably could get the job done, this seems inefficient.

[ScottWorld]

Yes, that's right — you would end up doing most of your data entry from the junction table.

Alternatively, you could add all of your tags to just one record in another table, and then check a checkbox to have an automation loop through all the tags to create all your records in the junction table.

However, in either scenario, you would end up with a junction table to give you the final results that you're looking for.

[mattster · Accepted solution]

A bit too complicated for me presently.  I have decided to create an additional column in the table called "Main Category" where there is only 1 tag.   Then I'll keep a secondary column with additional tags.  I'll use that "main category" to do filter/create a table per my original request above.

Thanks for getting back to me!

[ScottWorld]

That’s a great solution!

And you’re welcome! Feel free to contact me through my website if you need to hire an expert Airtable consultant for anything in the future.