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.

[Bill_Bither]

+1 We would be able to support multiple levels of user/role access if we had this capability and could extend our use of airtable considerably

[Kyle_Bento]

+1 We’re trying to find the balance between usability (not having 100s of tables in a base) and power (having different departments all rolling their projects up to company wide efforts and this seems to be the missing link.

[Scott_Gorman]

+1

It would be great if Airtable could at least give us some indication that this is being explored and a timeframe. It’s honestly the one feature that I think is holding Airtable back from broader uses.

Ps. Otherwise love the product and have been using for quite some time now at work and at home.

[nathaniel_pulsi]

@Katherine_Duh @Andrew @Airtable_Team +1 It is highly disconcerting that no one from the company addresses this enormous thread and highly vocal demand. Like most, i’m a paying customer and happy to stay one, but need this functionality.

[Javid_Jamae]

Katherine_Duh:

When different users have explained to us why they would like to be able to create a link between bases, it’s useful to look at the fundamental problem each person is trying to solve—and it turns out, people’s use cases can be radically different. It’s not clear that in all the cases mentioned in this thread, linking across bases is the best possible solution to that case’s fundamental problem. By this, I mean that linking across bases could be a solution to one person’s particular problem, but it might also create a whole new series of problems. Or it might not! It really depends on the use case.

@Katherine_Duh There is a straight-forward common thread in all the use cases. The vast majority of use cases I’m reading here have to do with data normalization and reuse of functionality. People don’t want to duplicate the same data and features across different bases.

It’s pretty simple, IMO:

• If I have a list of people, I don’t want to recreate my CRM functionality across multiple bases and have duplication.
• If I have a list of products, I don’t want to recreate my entire product-catalog functionality across multiple bases and have duplication.

Most relational databases allow you to link across databases, and some even allow you to link across database servers. This may be restricted to virtual views, read-only access, or whatever. But it is an essential feature when working with complex database, which I’m sure most of your customers evolve into over time.

I haven’t read every post here, but reading several of the recent posts, it seems like an update on your considerations and status on this would be greatly appreciated.

[Anthony_Gizzare]

I thought that this idea was so self explanatory that I submitted a support request thinking I was too dumb to find the feature. I second this request.

[Kim_Trager1]

+1 from here - need this so badly.

[Albert_Abrantes]

Waiting for this feature

[Barry_McCardel]

@Katherine_Duh - having thought about this for a couple of days, the most elegant solution in my mind would be the ability to “import a view” of a table from one base to another.

If I’m in Base A, I could have a table from Base B represented in A as a read-only, dynamically-updating view. I could then use those records in Base A. Users in Base A would have read-only view access to that table.

Then you could have a feature that shows where else a table is being used, e.g., the Base B team can see that one of their tables has been imported to 3 other Bases, and be in touch with those teams if they’re making a schema change, for instance.

[Tera]

+1 As @Javid_Jamae said, the ability to NOT recreate the same data across different bases (products, for example).