URL filters for lookup field on share view seems to not work

[Kenny_DITS]

Hello,

When you shared a view via a private link, you can then filter directly within the url.
This is really interesting when this is public information to not be forced to create one view for each field you want to make a share view.

It just seems filtering with the URL filter_fieldName=value on “lookup field” doesn’t work. It works on every other fields, but not on “lookup field”

Does anyone have a solution to fix that please ?
Thanks

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @Kenny_DITS! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Sorry that you haven’t had a response on this before now. I haven’t tested this, but my gut impression says that lookup fields don’t filter as expected when passing that filter in a URL because lookup fields return (in most cases) arrays, while the data you’re passing in the URL is probably a string or a number. To get what you want, you could create a formula field that echoes the contents of the lookup. This formula can be pretty simple:

{Lookup Field} & ""

By concatenating the lookup field output with an empty string, Airtable converts the whole thing into a string. Now set your URL-driven filter based on that formula, and it should work closer to how you expect.

[Kenny_DITS]

Thanks for the reply and for your time.

This seems like an hacky solution to fix what can be seen as a bug today :slightly_smiling_face:
I’m not feeling confortable to create such fake field just to get around bugs but thanks anyway for this idea that will probably work.

I was wondering why the documentation doesn’t tell that url filters is not possible for lookup field or how to use it with lookup field (if your assumption around types is right, and i think it is).

Thanks

[Justin_Barrett]

I’m not sure that I’d call this a bug. I think it kind of rides the line between a bug and a feature that just doesn’t behave as one would hope. :slightly_smiling_face: FWIW, you would have the same problem creating a manual filter inside of Airtable. It’s not just the URL filter that behaves this way. It’s all due to how lookup fields return arrays in most cases, combined with the fact that Airtable’s filter system isn’t designed to work with arrays.