Duplicating Records in Group View only

[Megan_Dunagan]

I am an artist working with various companies in various Markets/Categories (ie: greeting cards, home decor, stationery, and gift).

Some companies are in multiple markets such as greeting cards & gift; whereas other companies just serve one. Think Micheal’s v.s. Hallmark. The former serves multiple markets while the latter is likely just greeting cards (just go with me).

So now that you have the back story, I’d like to be able to Group by Markets/Categories, BUT, I would like a record to duplicate itself in this view to list in BOTH greeting cards and gift. I DON’T want it to be Grouped as “Greeting Cards, Gift” because it could be the only company listed as such.

First screen shot shows my basic table prior to grouping:

Second screen shot shows what it looks like after grouping. I’d like Company 1 to be split (duplicated) into both Gift Bags and then also Party Paper (IN ONLY THIS GROUP VIEW) To be clear: I want Party Paper to be it’s own group without me having to create duplicate listings of the same company.

Is this possible? Thanks!

[Ayesha_Azmi]

@Elias_Gomez_Sainz can you please re-share this base as I’m have the same issue.

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

It seems I’ve deleted it :frowning:

You can check this: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/218734758-A-beginner-s-guide-to-many-to-many-relation...

Oh, you have this one: https://airtable.com/shr9WkhOfZ2d4Lcl6/tbliFxgSP4XHQEc5c/viwgotiPZkpeVMTNl

[Brandon_Boswell]

This would be incredible useful. I find myself wanting @Megan_Dunagan 's behavior any time that I do a grouping.

[Matt_Leese]

I have been waiting for this for a while now and see that this conversation and others like it are pretty old. It’s reasons like this that I am not paying for this product. If I have 2 tables, each with hundreds of records, I find it ridiculous that I have to make another table using data from the first 2 just to display groups properly. It seems like a simple fix to make it so the grouping is by individual record and not as a group. It’s also silly that having records in a different order (A,B and B,A) will display as 2 groups. Are there any developers at Airtable that are willing to address this for users, please? Do this and a couple other things and you will start getting my money.

[Mike_Plis]

I’m pretty disappointed that this feature isn’t available. If I wanted to deal with join tables and many-to-many relationships, I’d just use a database. Airtable is appealing to me because it (usually) frees me from having to deal with databases and allows me to organize my data in a way that’s intuitive to me.

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

Matt_Leese:

the grouping is by individual record and not as a group

If a record has two values in a field, and you group by that field, in which of those groups would you include it? Remember that you only have ONE record that cannot be in two groups at the same time.

[Kevin_Rushton]

Elias_Gomez_Sainz:

Remember that you only have ONE record that cannot be in two groups at the same time.

The whole point is that it should appear in both. The “tables” in Airtable are already views, not true relational tables. The point is that this wouldn’t be the default option; anyone choosing to have their records displayed this way would either already know that some records will appear more than once, or could be shown a warning message informing them of this. I don’t see what the problem is–the whole point of Airtable is to liberate people from the arcane restrictions of SQL databases while still providing some of the same advanced functionality.

Basically, the result would be the same as the result a GROUP BY query, except that the fields would be editable. Changing anything in either of the resultant records would change it in both.

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

I see at least one problem: that aggregated calculations. Although of course, they could be also fixed to user every record just one time.

Anyway, having an auxiliary table is most of the times the way to go. In my example, you could add incomes by years, group by them, etc.

[Jeff_Carroll1]

I am also encountering this frustration. We have a larger Project Roadmap that we are building in Airtable.

Each row is equivalent to a request, so there are numerous fields associated with it. We have one field–iterations–that needs to be a multiple linked record since work can occur across multiple months.

If I then attempt to group by iterations, I get a display that doesn’t show the work under “May” and under “June”. Instead I get an additional grouping for “May June”. If this is only a View, there should be a way to handle this. Otherwise Multiple Linked Records combined with Grouping By is painful.

[Jeff_Carroll1]

The issue I find is with one-to-many relationships, when the grouping field chosen it the many linked record. I would expect an option so the grouping is broken down by the individual linked records. Instead it treats multiple-linked records as a single sub-header. It makes a complex AirTable difficult to organize visually.