Can we please have an 'error' value instead of preventing ALL POSSIBLE circular references?

[Jason_Nordin]

I understand the conditions you don’t allow - referencing record links in primary field formulas - but it it far too limiting. This is a huge, very frustrating issue for me. I’ve gone at length looking at solutions to get around it, but honestly, they’re all so much more data entry and work that it’s not worth the time or effort.
All I want is for the record name, in other tables, to be searchable and addable by a formula-able name, or there’s no point. And I’m never trying to do anything that would create a circular reference anyway. (That I’m aware of)

It would make things so much simpler if you just threw an error in the field when it tried to calculate and it actually created a circular reference, instead of refusing any situation that might possibly create one.

Please?

If not… I need a simple solution/tutorial, that actually fits those needs, and doesn’t require 6 records for every record I want entered and searchable on other tables by a formula-based name.

[Justin_Barrett]

Something about your description of the problem isn’t clicking for me.

Jason_Nordin:

All I want is for the record name, in other tables, to be searchable and addable by a formula-able name

My best-guess interpretation of that goes something like this. Say you’re entering the names of people attending a party, and you’re choosing those names from another [People] table. In that table, the primary field isn’t a text field, but a formula that concatenates the contents of {First Name} and {Last Name} fields. If you need to add a record on the fly for someone not already on the [People] table, you can’t just enter their name because the full name comes from two other fields, so you have to fill in those individual fields, when what you want is to just have the name work as entered.

Still that doesn’t get into a circular reference scenario, so I’m not sure that’s what you’re talking about. If not, can you provide a more detailed example of what you’re trying to achieve, and specifically where the circular reference problem comes into play?

[Jason_Nordin]

That’s pretty close. A lot of my use cases have a cobbled together hierarchy on multiple tables (category A, item A1/A2/etc.) and I want to be able to link them together by that combined ID; or with the category IN the name just from a basic formula so it’s searchable from entry.

It would still make item entry a little bit of a pain, but at least it doesn’t require several different records entered on several tables just to get the name right on one. Heck, if you could just search and enter record links by their other columns – you can see it on the linked record, can’t you? – or maybe search and link by a rollup or lookup field, that would really kinda fix the problem. Then I could search in the parent field, (for example) and it would bring up all the relevant records in the referenced field it could come from, and you’d then select from that list.

You do bring up a good point, though. It would be really nice if entering a new linked record, where the linked tables’s primary field is a formula, could act as a miniature form - it would take csv values, (…is that redundant? :: CSVV?) in order, and plug them into the relevant fields on the record. This could happen automatically, but if it made things simpler, you could also use a ‘FIELDS’ command somewhere that passes the entered values in order into [entry column 1, entry column 2, …]. That could make formulas really powerful, because you can perform operations on the entered strings within the command. Ofc, it would just overwrite a string if it’s entered twice, which wouldn’t do much, maybe that could be used to do complex operations, but it would go a long way towards fully automating entry with (I presume) little backend required. And it would surely make it clearer when a circular reference is actually created?