Smart Defaults with Grouped and Filtered Views

[Donald_Newlands]

Two of my biggsest gripes Airtable are: 1) not being able to add records when the view is grouped, and 2) having records disappear as they are entered if the filter field is not set.

Instead, what if Airtable always defaulted the fields in a new record to match the grouping values where it is created? For example, if my view is grouped by Project and Task and I add an item in the Project “A”/Task “B” subgroup, how wonderful it would be if I could add a record there and have it default to Project A and Task B!

Setting defaults this way would also go a long way to making life easier for those of us who use a lot of filtered views. If the groups also covered the filtered fields, I wouldn’t have so many new records accidentally disappear because they no longer match the criteria.

This field default idea sort-of works now in the Kanban view. When you add an item to a list, the value of the single select that the view is based on is set to the value of the list. I say “sort of” because it’s too easy to enter an item into a list and watch it be filtered out of the view.

Also, I wish that there could be a “require filter fields” option that simply would not allow users to enter data into filtered views without setting the fields on which the filter criteria are based and smartly offer default values to match the view being worked on.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

This actually does work for both grouping and filtering, and for just about every field type – except formulated fields. If you group/filter records by a non-formulated field (say a “Collaborator” field, or a “Date” field, or a “Text” field), you can add a record and have those fields auto-filled with the value of the group or filter applied. It even works 2, 3, 4 groupings deep.

It just doesn’t work on formulated fields, because it’s not possible for it to work on formulated fields.

[Katherine_Duh]

Jeremy essentially already said what I was going to say, but just to reiterate: you can add new records when in a grouped view when it’s 100% unambiguous what values you want the new row to have based on the grouping specifications.

Here’s an example with single select fields.

It also works with linked record fields:

[Donald_Newlands]

Thanks - that’s awesome!
So, if my view is filtered to Project = “ABC-123” and I include project as my top level group, “ABC-123” will always auto-fill on the filter field. Yea!!!
I didn’t see it (the plus sign) because we mostly group on lookup values.
-Donald

[Andrew_MacNeill]

This doesn’t really work in the way I would expect it to.

Here’s the use case:
List view - named Recent Items -> filtered on “Active” (flag) and Status (lookup)

When I create a new item, I give it a name and it says “This item appears in the filtered view” but when I save it, it hasn’t defaulted these fields so as a result, my new item disappears.

I would expect a few things from creating a new record in the filtered view:

1. All filtered fields that are based on a set value (like Active, Status, etc) would be defaulted to that value.
2. The entry to be possibly alerted in case it would be filtered out so you would know to correct it otherwise.

If I’ve missed something, please let me know but I’m not seeing this work as you’ve described it above.

Thanks

[Michael_Hastie]

This is great. To bad it doesn’t work like this on mobile. It knows something is happening when a little message box appears “current record is filtered”. Would be better if it added filtered value.

[Admin_Admin]

Hello,

On my side it happens only with the grouped values not the filtered one. So basically for my case, I filter every view for one country and then group it by an extra field. when I create a new record within a specific country view, it just disappear and goes to the default view.

I believe we still need the same feature of smart fill for the filtered views.

Thanks,

[Meri_Wilson]

So I found a workaround for this as I noticed that the fields do autofill if you have grouping turned on, but not for the filter criteria.

In your chosen filtered view, just set a new ‘group’ to be the field you want to autopopulate, and drag it to the top of the list. It will very slightly change your view, but essentially it just puts everything into one big group and that field will now autopopulate if you create a record in that view.

[My use case: I have a master task list which is largely useless as it’s SO big, so I have multiple views which are each filtered by the project name. Within each of those, I have a top ‘group’ by Project Name so that any new records in those views automatically contain the project, are included in the filter and therefore don’t disappear :slightly_smiling_face: ]