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.

[Alexander_Sorok]

Hi Dan,

It’s a clever idea, but there’s a few limitations that will make it somewhat unusable. First a Zap will fire only once for a single record, hence you won’t see any updates after the zap fires. Second, most records in Airtable are created empty and then get updated as you fill in the data. As the zap can fire at any time, you’ll likely get lots of partially completed records. Third, the cost of Zapier for such a use case may be a concern.

If you want to play with it further, you could try creating an Airtable view that only reflects stable records and then Zapier could sync all of those to another base.

Lastly, we’ve always wanted to build a beautiful user experience around linking across bases and we think hard about how to do that.

Cheers!
Alex

[Keri_Sprinkle]

Count me as another vote for this functionality!

[Allen_Patin]

+1. I would like several teams to update their bases and have a management team with the same bases but with all the data aggregated.

[Hailey_Pate]

+1 – When this feature becomes available, all of my dreams will come true. Seriously, this will be a huge game changer for me and the many folks I’d like to onboard to this tool.

[Crystal_S]

I would love this feature!!!

[James_Allen]

I second everyone’s request for this feature. It is available in your standard Excel spreadsheet files, so I am surprised isn’t already available in Airtable. That being said, you guys are doing an awesome job and I love all of the features Airtable has that Excel doesn’t have (or Google Sheets for that matter). Keep up the good work!

[David_Wiese]

Me three!

-=<|[{O}]|>=-

[Luis_Galaz]

Would be very nice to have…

[Ahmad_Dowla]

This is a feature that would tremendously improve AirTable’s utility for our nonprofit organization. In our ideal world, we would have a Contacts base with names that could then be linked back to from other bases such as Events, Projects, Donations, Grants, etc.

[Katherine_Duh]

Clearly, this is a very popular feature request! As Andrew said above, it’s certainly something that we are thinking about, though there are a variety of technical hurdles that would need to be cleared first. Since this is a huge undertaking, we want to make sure that we approach this in the correct way. Any specific ideas on how and why you’d want linked bases to work would be greatly appreciated!

Based on your responses, it seems like there are at least few reasons why one might want to link across bases, all of which raise interesting questions that we need to consider going forward:

1. Linking across bases could work as a form of granular permissioning (e.g. the Sales team has access to the sales base, and the PR team has access to the PR base, and though they might be able to see selected data from the other team’s base, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to alter it or read all of it). If this is your main reason for wanting cross-base linking: would your needs be met by Airtable implementing more granular permissioning controls at the table level or even the field level (e.g., password protected/hidden/redacted tables/fields that certain users are not allowed to see)? Is it more important to you that different users have access to different bases for privacy reasons (i.e. it’s mission critical that certain users don’t see certain bits of information), or for convenience reasons (i.e. I don’t want all users to see everything in one big base because not all of that data is relevant to their interests)?

2. Using linking across bases in order to create a manager/“master” base, which draws information from a number of sub-bases. Would your needs be met in this case by some sort of reporting functionality that takes information from many bases, or is it particularly important that this information takes the form of another base?

3. (Please correct me if I’m wrong about this.) A general sense that a large base with many tables feels cramped—that you have to “cram” what feels like too much data into one place. If this describes you, can you articulate why you feel this way? Is it because of how a base with many tables looks? Is it because of loading times? Is it because you feel like having too much information in one place is overwhelming?

Other considerations: How would you like linking across bases to interact with permissions? Say there are two bases, A and B. A user has access to Base A but not access to Base B, and Base A includes links to Base B. What should the user see when they look at Base A? How would linking across bases work with editing? Should you be able to edit the contents of Base B while in Base A, or should you have to go to Base B first?

There are so many things to say about linking bases, but this is enough for now, I think. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: