Parent/Child Relationship as a backend process

[ehigley]

Hello,

I am sure this is a heavily requested topic, so if this is on the roadmap great, if not I really think this process would help a lot of users. I use Airtable for a number of use cases and have multiple builds. One feature that is rather consistently peeking its head is parent child linking. The first time this arose, and my primary use case, is in a contract management system my team and I built in Airtable. The question arose whether or not Airtable can achieve parent/child linking. The general consensus was a resounding "NO." I took this on as a challenge and after many hours of trouble shooting and testing, I believe I created a working two way linking between two or more records in our contracting system that links the parent to the children and child to the parent. This bidirectional syncs allows for various contract managers to work and link the records as they come in. Further, using the OrgChart extension, we can now see the entire contract family in a visual manner. 

Now for the downside. This requires 5 separate automations with multiple actions and triggers which causes the linkage to be rather slow. I believe that if this was converted to a native backend process it would be speed up that linkage time and free up automation space in our base.

Again if this is already on the roadmap great. However, if it is not and you would to explore the concept and would like to see how this works I am happy to provide a screen recording and screenshots.

Regards,

Eljay Higley

[Karlstens]

Yup, I too have used automations as a workaround for what I believe should be a priority core feature - same-table parent/child linked fields, that out-of-the-box Just Work™ - without the need for scripting or Automation. Fingers crossed that we'll see some action here soon.

[Annika]

PLEASE

The list view is so limited with only one level of child tasks. 

And then these do not even work properly when you show the list within the record detail itself (because the CHILD tasks are not directly related to the record!!)

My Use Case
Initiative (Table 1) > Tasks (Table 2) > Sub-Tasks (Table 2)

I have an interface looking at an initiative (table 1), I have a list view where I want to show the tasks and sub-tasks but sub-tasks are NOT shown because they are NOT related to the Initiative. 

When you create a child task, it doesn't know its parent so it makes automations sooo complex (and unnecessary). I want to know if my task in table 2 has a parent and if it does, inherit the linked initiative. It feels so hard