Search a record when adding a linked record

[Sebastien_Gille]

Hello community

When you are creating a new record using a form, you can search for other records to be linked to the one you are creating (if you have a linked field). I have been reading the different previous posts and I understood we can only search by the primary field. So, in our company, we set up all primary fields as a concatenation of different data, let’s say “Location - Name”.

In the search bar to identify the right record
If I type Location A, I got all the results with Location A - working fine
If I type Name A, I got all the results with Name A - working fine
But if I type Location A and Name A, no more result at all

Is there a way to search for several words or just letters in the search bar?

Thanks for your help

[Sebastien_Gille]

[Justin_Barrett · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the community, @Sebastien_Gille! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Unfortunately that kind of freeform search isn’t supported. The search features in Airtable are written by the developers, and users don’t have any control over how they operate. If you’d like to request a more robust search behavior, I recommend contacting Airtable support directly.

In the meantime, there are third-party form options that may have different search functionality, though I haven’t used any of them sufficiently to know whether or not any of them would perform as you describe. You might reach out to Dan at @openside to see if the search capabilities in On2Air: Forms (which runs through JotForm) can do what you want.

[ScottWorld]

There is now an external solution to this problem. You can now use Fillout, which lets you specify as many fields as you want that will be searchable in linked record fields.