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.

[Andrew_Borden-C]

Would happily upgrade and pay for this feature!

[Carlos_Martin]

In fact, Another way would be to be able to have a different group of tables inside one base. And it would help to have that shown visually by having different colors on the top of the base where you see all tables. Imagine having 2, 3, 3… row of table tabs for each group, one on top of each other. And you could give different permissions for each group. Would that be easier/feasible?

[Robert_Granhol1]

1. I dont want all users to see all data

[John_Bacino]

Who proposed allowing “all users to see all data?”

[Brooke_Lyssy]

Please please please add the capability to link between bases! I don’t want to risk overloading one base with so many tables; sometimes having more than two levels of categorization (such as the two you can create when you make a base, i.e. Base:Table) on a project warrants creating distinct bases (i.e. Big Project:Aspect 1:[A Distinct Set of Tables]; Big Project:Aspect 2:[A Distinct Set of Tables]).

[Marshall_Vaughn]

This capability, along with Airtable’s current trajectory, would make it nigh unstoppable. I want to dump all my data into Airtable, but view things in a narrow enough scope to be manageable.

[Michael_Berman1]

A sufficient implementation for my needs would be the ability to manipulate the access to the various tables. If I can restrict table access, I can tailor the interface to the user. By building ‘gates’ on sensitive info by using lookup on referenced hidden tables I can control the level of access.

This would be great for me because I currently maintain 2 bases so that inventory cannot see project financial information. If I could hide tables as ‘table sets’ and then give access to the table set, I would have the control similar to linking bases, and I could then join bases that need cross access.

Doable?

Michael

PS This is the biggest advance in the last 5 years for sure. AWESOME job.

[HIRAM_ROSENBERG]

25 years ago in an x-Base DBMS we developed applications that handled millions of records in upwards of 70 tables for an aircraft manufacturer; we wrote shop manuals for fleet mechanics. We needed to include data from an engineering database that gets updated overnight 6 days each week. We wrote a custom extract program (with permission from the engineering department’s IT group, of course) of selected data organized into forms we could upload into “fill, use, and empty” tables we thought of as temporary data tanks. Creating and then dumping temporary tables has limitless power and was a standard practice for every programmer and application designer I went to for advice. Our extracts ran every night right after engineering’s tables updated, and every morning when we walked into the office all the external data we needed was at the ready. I suggest this as a sample of a method that solved the problem without introducing data duplication or our-of-synch data entries. I’m thinking that some people who commented might be able to create an output report of selected data from the 2nd database specifically formatted to load a table in their primary database. This bypasses issues with security and with accidentally editing another database’s records, plus it doesn’t require the database engine to manipulate complicated links.

As an afterthought, I’m new to Airtable as of this week (very happy so far), so I don’t yet know its limitations, but in my own experience I never met a database that couldn’t take on one more table!

[David_Earley]

This is a possible solution that others have hinted at. If there could be a way to allow for a table to be duplicated to another database and that when changes to the source database are made that are also made in batch or on the fly to all the duplicate databases tables that would make a bunch of things possible.

Plus if you could select the fields that you want copied/duplicated that would even be better.

Because then the source table can be protected in the source database. The duplicate table data would be a special read only for all in the new database. This can then be used to lookup information, updated records, link tables without the many problems. If the source is removed or changed in a way that make the link stop the duplicate could remain static but report an error. Changes would not be allowed the other way.

You could do this by batch loading the table over and over but I think that would mess up the links.

If anyone know of way of doing this now please let me know.

[jeremy_heuerman]

Would be great to at least have a table search to use if adding a dozen+ tables to a base as a workaround, and way to hide most of the tables so its not taking up multiple rows at top of screen.