Parent and Child Table

[Manny]

Basically, my use case is similar to authors and books they have written. the parent table would include information about the author, like name, age, etc. Each author will only have one row. The child table consists of books they have written and the book’s information, like copyright date, publishing house, etc. What I need is for the parent table to have in one cell( so not duplicating the authors) each of the book’s information, not just the name, the author has written and the parent table is updated whenever there is a new entry inside of the child table. if this was a database, it would be a regular Authors table with a JSON called books with each book’s information, not just the name, the author has written. I could technically do this using the airtable API but that would create too many calls as I would have to filter for each author

[ScottWorld]

You can learn more about linked records here:

Airtable - Support

The power of Airtable's linked records

One of the unique aspects of managing your information in a database is the power of linking records together across tables. Linked records can eliminate redundancy, enforce data integrity, and ena...

[Manny]

Hi Scott,

Linked Records doesn’t work for me, as it doesn’t gather all the row information from the child table into that one cell. I updated my original post to be clearer

[Kamille_Parks]

If I’m understanding you correctly, you will still need to link records together as Scott said and then create a Formula field in your [Books] table that will use a formula something like this:

"{\n" & 
"Book Title: " & {Book Title field} & "\n" &
"Copyright: " & {Copyright info field} &
"\n}"

This will get you a single “object” for each Book that you can display in the [Authors] table using a Lookup field.

[Manny]

Yes, this seems to be what I need. How will each book be separated? is it a comma or would it be a list of JSONs in this case? Sorry I guess I could just test it and find out.This is a great lead!

[Kamille_Parks]

Using a Lookup field you will get something that looks like this (assuming you add in commas to the formula above):

{
Book Title: The Hunger Games,
Copyright: 2008
}, {
Book Title: Catching Fire,
Copyright: 2009
}

This isn’t JSON, but you could make it more JSON friendly by doing something like this:

'"title": "' & {Book Title field} & '"\n' 

to get

"title": "The Hunger Games"