The Page Designer block has a fantastic feature that lets me display a “Link to another record” field and sort those records by a field inside those linked records. It even lets me choose what text to display so instead of only pulling the Primary Field, I can display any field I want. In that way. it almost seems like it behaves like a Lookup field, but it’s surprising how much more control it allows here.
An example of my situation:
I have a table of Dates. Each Date is linked to a Project.
I have a table of Projects. In this table I have a “Link to another record” field that pulls in Dates that are linked to each Project.
The problem:
That’s all that the “Link to another record” field lets me do. I can’t sort or customize what text is displayed. I can use the “Batch Update” block to sort this field, but it sorts it by alphabetical order, a completely useless order when it comes to dates since it ends up sorting by the event’s Primary field, and not the date.
I could rework the Dates table so the date is the Primary field. That would result in the list of dates being in order when I pull them into another table using a “Link to another record” field. But that would also result in a list of dates, and not a list of named events. Not much use. A list of unnamed dates, in chronological order, and a list of named events, in alphabetical order are both less than ideal.
Why does the “Link to another record” field in the Page Designer block allow for so much customization, while the same field in a Table, Gallery, or Kanban view doesn’t allow for any at all?
