Request: a better UI for linking tables, without the need for Linked Fields. Also, allowing users to link records on something other than the Primary Key. Scenario: I am in the midst of building out a Base that will replace a local Sports club’s player management database. The current method being used is an Excel spreadsheet that has a number of Vlookups and other formulas to determine computed player abilities (based on tryouts) so that teams can be equally balanced and assigned. Airtable looks like the perfect fit us, but I struggle with the requirement to create a Linked Field for every single lookup. The end result is I have a number of extra ‘dummy’ fields that don’t hold data and just make the interface messy and hard to follow. Additionally, the way that Linked Fields work, they automatically just join on the Primary Key, with no ability to pick another field to join on or even format the field (ex no ability to join on a concatenation of values). This is making some of my desired table joins impossible or extremely convoluted. Coming from a background in MS SQL Server, this seems like an overly complex way to create table joins and yet annoyingly limiting at the same time. I feel like if we had a separate UI for specifying table joins, we could a) really simplify the process and b) offer more possibilities on the types of fields that can be joined together.
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