Probably a niche use case but wondering anyone can think of a way to make this happen.
I'm trying to use airtable to organize some wire and cable take-off quantities and routing for a large scale construction project. The main entities (tables) are wire/cable, conduit, and pull/junction boxes. The boxes are like the nodes, the conduit link nodes together, and the wire runs through the conduit and boxes from an origin box to a terminal box. There may be many levels of branching. Possible that there is some spider-webbing as opposed to just straight branching but not positive yet (rare if so).
I have the table setup so that there is a record of conduits, with an "origin" and "destination field each linking to the table of pullboxes. This link defines the end points, or nodes, of the conduit IE Conduit #1 goes from Pullbox A to Pullbox B. Conduit #2 goes from Pullbox A to Pullbox C, Conduit #3 goes from Pullbox B to Pullbox D, Conduit #4 goes from Pullbox D to Pullbox E, etc etc. Always going to be one pullbox on either end of a conduit (1-1 conduit beginning/end points to a pullbox)
The pullbox table would have a list of all pullboxes (nodes) and could be and each box would be flagged if it was in fact an origin box (wires start there IE a power drop point) or a terminal box (the piece of equipment the wires go to at the end of a run).
The wire table would have a list of all the different wires on the project, and then be linked to the conduits they run through. This should be relationship then also already define which pullboxes they pass through, as the pullboxes are defined as each end of the conduit the wires were assigned to. Wires will start at one or more origin boxes and then group up going into conduits (many wires per conduit) but might branch at pullboxes). For the example above, Wires #1-5 might go from PB A to PB B through Conduit #1 and Wires #6-10 would go from PB A to PB C through Conduit #2. When Wires #1-5 get to PB B, Wires #1-3 could go to PB D through conduit #3 while wires #4-5 go somewhere else.
I currently have this setup linking conduit ends to pullboxes, wires to conduits, and then the conduits are also linked to themselves defining parent-child relationships on the conduit routing (IE Conduit #1 feeds in Box B which has Conduit #2 exiting PB B, therefore Conduit #1 is the parent conduit of Conduit #2 and possible others).
I have this basic working in the org chart extension, the caveat being that I want to label both the connecting lines of the chart (which would be the conduits) and the nodes of the chart (pullbox, what would usually be like the employee name). Basically I want the node (pull box) to just say the record Name and maybe 1-2 attributes from the record (IE Pullbox #1, 30x24, Concrete; Pullbox #2, 12x18, Metallic) AND then the connecting lines to be labeled with the conduit record names and attributes (IE line between PB #1 and PB #2 would be labeled Conduit #1 4" PVC Wires #1-5). The point is to show schematically how everything connects and then what the branching route specifically of the wires is, as they need to be organized and pulled through together (talking many hundreds of conducts of varying sizes and tens or hundreds of separate systems/branches).
Any elegant way to make this happen within airtable? The data on the relationships for everything would be there, its just getting it visualized.
Alternatively in a table format rather than a graphical format, if anyone can think of a way to get the conduits to be stated in order of the pull within a lookup or something similar (IE wire #1 gets pulled through Conduit #1 then Conduit #2 then Conduit #7) with the caveat that unfortunately the conduits are not always in numerical order and the names are more complex, so using alphabetical/numerical sorting would not help, that could work too.
EDIT: added a screen cap of the org chart extension. This shows records in "Conduits" as nodes, and the secondary field is a count of the # of wires in the conduit. The relationship field is the "Parent Conduit" field. This correctly shows the spread, but actually what I want is the boxes to be records from "Pull Boxes" and the nodes in this screenshot to be the lines between boxes (labeled as they are). The current nodes show what is actually the physical line (a conduit) that would connect two nodes (pull boxes).
