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 “Support” instead of “feature request”.
+1 for this request. At a minimum, I’d like to make sure that we’ve 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 “similar”. 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 couldn’t get beyond two tables before I realized there was no true primary key field. In AirTable’s 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, we’ve built an extension that allows you to prevent duplicates.
I haven’t 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 “Application” and a “Version” table.
An “Application” field on “Version” links to an “Application” record.
A “Name” field on “Version” describes the version name.
You wouldn’t want to have multiple records combining the Application “Sublime Text” and version “3.2.2” 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 “RECORD_ID() + " " + Name” and activate a “unique” 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.
