Importing and linking 3 different tables

[Noah]

Hi all,

Apologies in advance if this was posted elsewhere - my use-case is slightly different from what I was seeing and I can’t seem to figure out how to get the results that I’m looking for - was hoping the community had some advice!

I imported 3 tables into Airtable:

1. Apartment Listings (Primary field is address, secondary field has a unique ID for each apartment)
2. Brokers (Primary field is the broker’s name, secondary field has a unique ID for each broker)
3. Broker Assignments (Primary field is the Apartment Listing ID from above, secondary field is the corresponding Broker ID from above)

Most of the spaces have several brokers listed on them, so on the Broker Assignments table, the same space is often listed 2-3 times with the corresponding broker. Similarly, there are brokers who are assigned to multiple apartment listings and if you sort by Broker ID, there could be 5-10 spaces that line up with them.

What I can’t seem to figure out is how to bring all of this information on to the first table (Apartment Listings), so that I have a linked field that lists all of the assigned brokers for each space and can be clicked on to bring up the individual brokers card and all of the spaces that he/she are associated with.

Does this make sense?

AnY and all help is so appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Noah

[SergioCodes]

Hi @Noah

I would do this:

• Apartment Listings - Primary field Unique ID
• Brokers - Primary field Unique ID
• Broker Assignments: Primary Field (Autonumber)

For Broker Assignments do this:

1. The apartment listing ID should be a simple field (not primary).
2. Convert that field to “Linked Record” and link to Apparment Listings table
3. The broker ID should be a simple field (not primary).
4. Convert that field to “Linked Record” and link to Brokers table

On steps 2 and 4 as Airtable knows that the unique ID is the primary key (for apartments and brokers), it will link the records automatically.

[Noah]

@SergioCodes
Thank you so much for chiming in here! I followed these steps and was able to get 90% of the way there - something I couldn’t have done otherwise so thank you so much!

The step not discussed was needed to convert the broker assignment ID’s (which were being mirrored to the apartment listings table) from the actual number of the assignment to the broker names. So once I had the listings and brokers tables linked to the assignments, I did the following:

1. On the assignments table, added a Lookup column to bring in the Brokers Names
2. With the names populated, I then changed the lookup column to be a text column
3. On the same table, I then changed the Primary field Unique ID by copy and pasting the Brokers names in

As a result, the Listings page which had been pulling just ID numbers was now pulling the actual names.

Thank you so much for your guidance and help here!

Noah

[ScottWorld]

@Noah

Oh cool, I see that you got your problem figured out!

I just replied to you about this same issue in another thread here:

Vlookup Style Search in the Same Table Ask the community

@Noah You’re almost there. First, you would actually want to temporarily make the Apartment ID the primary field in the Apartment Listings database. This will require you to copy & paste columns of data to move things around in your system. That’s because when you’re linking from a field in one table (“Table B”) to another table (“Table A”), Airtable only links to the data in the Primary Field in that other table (“Table A”). Unlike other database languages, Airtable doesn’t give you any othe…

[Noah]

Thanks @ScottWorld! Much appreciated.