Nesting Table Tabs

[Shannon_Tefft-1]

My database has a lot of separate tables. A many of the tables “belong” or feed into certain other tables. It would be nice to “assign” a table to only those tables related to it and these subordinate tables are only viewed when the “parent” table is being viewed.

For example, let’s say I have five tables:
Items
Donations
Purchases
Membership
Affiliation
Restrictions

I only need to see the tabs for the Donations and Purchases tables when the Items table is up. Likewise Affiliation and Restrictions can be subordinate to Membership. So, when I open up Airtable, it only has the Items and Membership tabs, and then when I click on Items, then the Donations and Purchases tabs will appear next to the Items tab.

What’s happening with me is that I have many tables and lots of tabs and it would be nice to be able to hide some of the table tabs and have them viewable only when I’m working on parent tables that use the child table’s information.

[Chris_Pearson]

This is a great idea. Might be more universally useful though if it was like the foldering system in iOS since some tables are related but there is not always a clear top level table.

[Shannon_Tefft-1]

One way is to classify a table as being a parent or child. Parent tables are the ones persistently shown at the top, while child tables appear only then the parent table is open( the tabs placed next to the parent for ease of navigation). A table can be a “child” to many different parent tables. Of course, if a table labeled as a child becomes de-linked, then it is automatically reclassified as a parent table so it can be accessed.

[Christoff]

One way is to classify a table as being a parent or child.

A table can be a parent and a child: Table1 -> Table2 -> Table3. In this case, Table2 is the child of Table1 and the parent of Table3.
In many-to-many relationships, both tables are parent and child, e.g. a movie has multiple actors and each actor has appeared in multiple movies.

Of course, Airtable could automatically handle the display of the relevant tables but it seems to me that it can become quite complex. (For example, take a look at junction tables.)

Ideally, Airtable would offer a customizable menu/switchboard/dashboard with contextual access to tables.

[Shannon_Tefft-1]

Well, yes. Because of the many to many relationships, this would be hard to completely automate without the user doing some designation.