This thread really highlighted the need for Airtable to automatically create “back links” (or “reverse links”) when you are creating a self-linking linked record field (i.e. a field relationship that links a table back to itself).
All other linked record fields in Airtable automatically create these “back links” or “reverse links”, but they don’t get created when doing a self-relationship within a single table.
This is especially crucial for using the Org chart block, which REQUIRES that you create a self-linking relationship within a table. The Org chart block doesn’t even support creating links between separate tables!
You’ll notice in the Org chart demonstration video that there are 2 self-linked fields: “Direct Reports” and “Direct Supervisors”. All of that data had to be manually inputted & manually verified by the user, because there is no automatic way to have those 2 fields automatically communicate with each other.
If you’re dealing with a very small number of records, it might be relatively easy & relatively trivial to manually input both sides of the links for every record. But once you start dealing with hundreds or thousands of records, it becomes a real chore to start manually managing all of these links.
Same problem if you’re trying to BREAK a self-relationship between 2 people. If you delete the relationship on one side, the relationship on the other side should AUTOMATICALLY break. But the way it is now, you actually have to remember to manually break both sides of the relationship.
Unfortunately, we only have 2 options for creating backlinks in Airtable:
(1) Write a custom JavaScript to handle this for us. Two scripts that do this are available here and here.
or
(2) For a no-code way of doing this that doesn’t require writing any programming code at all, we can use Make’s advanced Airtable automations, which is a no-code automation tool for Airtable.
But all of this should be natively built into Airtable.
I was a FileMaker developer for over 30 years before becoming an Airtable consultant, and FileMaker is an advanced database app that natively solves this problem because backlinks are automatically built into the product.
FileMaker solves all the other Airtable limitations as well, because FileMaker is a full-blown programming language with no limits.
If anybody needs a referral to a FileMaker developer, feel free to reach out to me through my website: https://www.scottworld.com/
Thanks,
Scott
