Link to other base

[John_Bacino]

So happy that someone finally filled the void left by Dabble DB.

One of the features I found most useful there, but can’t seem to do in Airtable, is linking to entries in another Base. Often, one will have multiple bases which handle distinct aspects of a business or project, but in which one piece of data overlaps.

Example: A political campaign may want Bases for contacting voters, managing events, and recording donations. Those are distinct domains which need their own Bases, but which could benefit from linking parts of them together. For example, it would be great to link donations to the event they occurred at, or voters to donations, or record who attended each event.

In Airtable at present one has to either cram all of those bases into one, or foregoe the linkage which makes this software so great. It may seem like a small thing, but once you can link bases, the sky is really the limit.

[Hashim_Warren]

@Jeremy_Sookhoo you nailed it. Nailed it. If I could set up a collection of views and tables for certain team members and their workflow… even if they have access to other data, that would make me comfortable having lots and lots of tables

[Howie]

To be clear, are you asking for something other than a bookmarkable URL that goes directly to a specific table, view, or record? These already exist–the URL automatically changes to reflect the current view/table/record, not just the Base–and can be bookmarked. Thanks!

[Dan_Klos]

I don’t mean to bring a negative vibe to this forum, but I’m curious if you guys at AirTable presently have other feature requests that are as popular or more than this one, and that has also been around for 8+ months now? A cursory look through requests says the answer is “no”, which makes me wonder how seriously you guys take user feedback.

[Hashim_Warren]

@Dan_Klos
I believe they addressed that:

Andrew:

This feature is definitely on our roadmap. Unfortunately it’s a pretty big undertaking for technical reasons, and we haven’t had the chance to tackle it yet. We hear and appreciate your feedback on this though, apologies for not acknowledging it earlier.

[Dan_Klos]

Hi @Hashim_Warren. I saw that, and I actually took that into consideration when writing. The feature request was created in October 2015, is the most highly requested feature, (I believe) the most highly engaged upon feature, and is “on the roadmap”.

I very much appreciate wanting to implement it carefully and thoughtfully, but taking 8 months to do so with an early-stage product of a well-funded company makes me a bit worried that I’ve trusted my data and operations of my company into a product that takes user feedback and “puts it on the roadmap”… forever. I guess I had higher hopes for faster iterations in line with high-demand user feedback.

[Howie]

Hi Dan, thank you very much for your feedback. A few thoughts:

1. IMHO, it’s not clear that this is the categorically most-requested and most-important feature. We have a number of other support and engagement channels, including email and chat support, in-person customer conversations, user studies, etc–and there are a number of other, equally-or-more-prevalent feature request patterns we’ve encountered (for instance, Android is a popular one–we’re actively working on it and have a beta right now–as is reporting functionality). It is true that this particular feature has ~50 comments to date on our community forum, but this is still a very small fraction of the total request volume across all channels.

2. We certainly don’t “put features on the roadmap forever”. Neither do we drop everything and immediately implement every highly-demanded feature. IMHO building a great product-driven culture requires thoughtful consideration of a number of factors, one of which is verbatim feature requests. But just as importantly, we must also consider things like:
   (a) feature or architectural dependencies, i.e. if we build one feature today, does it unlock or make easier another feature.
   (b) roadmap coherence, i.e. we want to group the creation of relevant features together into a theme.
   © design, i.e. we don’t want to make the product incrementally more complex with every additional feature we add, which means we must deeply think through the problem and find the most elegant way to implement it (and do so across multiple devices/interface paradigms). Often there’s a more “meta” feature behind a feature request. If we implement a sub-optimal design today, this also makes it very hard to change things down the road if users have built expectations or workflows around the old design.
   (d) architecture and scalability, i.e. we must thoughtfully conceive and implement the technical architecture, which is an especially hard problem when dealing with realtime collaboration, merge conflict resolution, and ensuring relational data structure integrity. Airtable has high performance demands, especially due to the volume of users making requests which are all synchronized in real-time. In particular, inter-Base linking has a number of challenges in this regard.

In short, we are actively considering designs and architectures to support inter-Base linking, but this is not a feature which can be trivially implemented, nor one that can be rushed out. I’ll also note that 8 months is not necessarily a long time-frame for major feature development in the world of (especially realtime, cross-device) productivity tools, due to the challenges described above. For instance, it took over a year for a small but very smart team within Google Docs to implement pivot table functionality.

[Polen]

@Dan_Klos Like you, I think this is a very important feature that will be extremely welcome. I also think their product is viable enough to have a bunch of us using it nonstop and still get more benefits from its existence than drawbacks from its potential-but-still-just-imagined features. That said, I want this to happen so it’d be great to get some updates on its status every once in a while.

[Dan_Klos]

I also think their product is viable enough to have a bunch of us using it nonstop and still get more benefits from its existence than drawbacks from its potential-but-still-just-imagined features.

Very true, @Polen, I agree. As someone in the startup space, in just makes me lose faith when I see high demand for a feature met with vague responses and little apparent concrete action. Thanks for the thoughtful, balanced reply.

[Jonathan_Fuller]

Just to throw my two sense in on this… Inter-Base linking for cleaner overall Views is undoubtedly a much needed (and obviously requested) feature however having frequented this community for some time I can certainly say it isn’t the single most requested feature. User / Collaborator permissions I believe would be second only to the Android requests. Inter-Base linking likely comes as a solid third.

Regardless, in my experience at least, Airtable has been “Johnny on the spot” to respond to all my inquiries and help requests going above and beyond to contact me directly by email in many cases. Considering I do not believe I have yet paid a dime (because of credits as I am well past the record limit) I can say without hesitation that I trust in the service and the team of folks steering the product through their “Roadmap”.

I have worked with numerous other platforms to attempt to mimick the ease of data entry (to access methodology) without finding a single other platform that offers a similarly clean input interface, mobile friendly access and ease of import/export functionality.

At this point I look very forward to seeing everything they have to offer in the future however am extremely grateful for the service they offer now.

[Dino_Celotti]

I’m just going to chime in merely to add my +1 to this feature.
I think the “then people can get around subs” can be easily solved by just making this feature unavailable at the free tier.

Others have already given example and use cases, but I think the core for us comes down to scale. As soon as users are in an medium to large organization, a single base gets very clunky very quickly. It’s less about security and access, and more about organization. Ending up with a base of hundreds of tabs just isn’t feasible. (perhaps this is use case specific, and perhaps Airtable isn’t the solution for us, but I sure was hoping!) :slightly_smiling_face: