I am glad each table in a base has one key column that must be unique (needed for relational databases), but instead of making this uniqueness requirement only available to the key column, please make this setting available to other fields also.
Some discussion on this topic has already been made (see Unique values in a column), but was listed under โSupportโ instead of โfeature requestโ.
A bit of a workaround that you could use is using the โUniqueโ at the bottom of your view. As long as it is โ100%โ, you know there are no duplicates.
+1 for this request. At a minimum, Iโd like to make sure that weโve not accidentally duplicated order numbers that should be unique. Ideally, with this feature it would at least alert us that there is another entry that matches. Would be helpful for both numbers (most important) and text. Fuzzy logic would be a bonus here so we can be alerted if text entered seems โsimilarโ. Of course, we can do all this manually with grouping and sorting, but with over 10K records that seems like a tremendous waste of time when a computer could do it for us on the fly.
Just signed on to give AirTable a go and just as quickly have to give up on it. I couldnโt get beyond two tables before I realized there was no true primary key field. In AirTableโs definition of primary field they indicate it should be unique but offer absolutely no way of enforcing said uniqueness.
Unfortunately, you cannot enforce unique values in Airtable itself, but if your data is coming from a form, weโve built an extension that allows you to prevent duplicates.
I havenโt written it up, but I assume you can write a script in the script block so that when that field is imputed if there is a match in that existing column, it either clears out the field or adds a 1 or something at the end of it.
Would be especially important to have unique formula fields.
For instance, take an โApplicationโ and a โVersionโ table.
An โApplicationโ field on โVersionโ links to an โApplicationโ record.
A โNameโ field on โVersionโ describes the version name.
You wouldnโt want to have multiple records combining the Application โSublime Textโ and version โ3.2.2โ at any given time.
You can see how this is usually achieved in a database like Postgres here.
A way to achieve this in Airtable would be to make a formula such as โRECORD_ID() + " " + Nameโ and activate a โuniqueโ flag on it.
I am sure the details of such an implementation are complex, but I think the general need for something like this makes sense.
