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I think it would be nice to have the option to hyperlink with different text showing, like any basic HTML hyperlinking. Like I can even do in this forum if I needed to.
Visually, having the url just there isn’t appealing.
FileMaker has always had a formula field, and it has been working amazingly well for them for 35+ years. What is the problem you see with formula fields?
And this is good progress. It suggests that more is likely coming and with that, some of the downsides of hybrid fields may diminish, but probably not all of them.
Can Airtable transform hybrid fields such as button and formula into a schema framework that is consistent and accessible?
Perhaps, and I certainly hope so, but I think it requires them to embrace fields with discrete actions and events.
Microsoft Access has also always had a formula field and it has also always had the ability to create a button with record scope. Many of the online databases that I looked into before settling on Airtable also had the equivalent of formula fields, although most are not as robust. Some of those other online databases also had the equivalent of a button field. The nomenclature might have been different, but the idea was the same–an action button with record level scope.
It’s really quite simple - formulas can only live in a field dedicated to the formula. As such, to have any formula logic, you must create another field that really isn’t a field at all. It seems to me that if you need a field based on a formula, create the field and APPLY a formula. That seems logical, intuitive, and embraces all that fields are designed for - storing values - whether computed or otherwise.
This gives you the latitude of creating fields that may conditionally utilize the APPLIED formula, or in some case – bend to API processes or human modifications that can override the formula contingent on the data values, etc.
Presently none of these behaviours is possible with formula fields; they are rigid little clumps of business logic that cannot fathom the idea that something other than their own logic may have something to contribute to that [faux] field’s ultimate value. This is a one-way street that railroads users into creating vastly more fields than typically needed.
If this alternate architecture were supported, it’s a pretty easy leap for a formula in field (a) to update a value in field (b) based on values in (a) or (b) and/or (n…).
There are ways to overcome some of these limitations in Airtable but they require around-the-barn travels and some of the barns are the size of Liechtenstein. You don’t have to search very far in the forum to see some wild workarounds and the vast majority of them seem to stem from formula fields as islands of logic that have no other place to write their results except on top of themselves.
In FileMaker, the formula field is actually called a “calculation field”, and they refer to its logic as the “calculation engine”.
At the beginning — for the first 19 years of FileMaker Pro, this “calculation engine” (“formula engine” in Airtable’s terms) was restricted to ONLY the “calculation field” (“formula field”).
So, for 19 years, we only had one field type (“formula field”) that could perform formulas with the “formula engine”.
But then, they start rolling out the “formula engine” out to many other parts of the product — and it even evolved alongside a “scripting engine” (FileMaker’s version of a scripting language). So now, the “formula engine” and the “scripting engine” power all sorts of amazing things in FileMaker. You can do nearly anything in the product with both the “formula engine” and the “scripting engine”.
But keep in mind that FileMaker is a product with a 35-year history — it came out in 1985. So it took a while to get there.
So I think that in due time, we will see Airtable’s “formula engine” get rolled out to other parts of the product. We’re already seeing this now! :slightly_smiling_face:
How exciting that we now have a brand new part of the system — the button field — that taps into this “formula engine”! :slightly_smiling_face:
And soon, we wil probably see this “formula engine” rolled out to other parts of the product as well! And I’m even hoping that they introduce a simple “Airtable scripting language” that doesn’t require learning JavaScript, which is daunting to many.
So, in my opinion, rolling out the formula field to other parts of the system is just the beginning of great new things that are in store for Airtable! :slightly_smiling_face:
Yep, I recall this vividly. I was at the 2012 FileMaker DevCon in Miami when they finally understood and announced that formulas should not be tightly bound to a special type of field. It took them until 2012 to fully unwind this design choice.
At best, I only have two decades left on this planet; they need to step it up. :winking_face:
Yeah, but no company should feel like they have 35 years to figure out anything and despite it’s long and storied heritage, FileMaker has and continues to struggle. Apple is likely part of the problem. I have a good friend - employee #5 at Claris so the memories, while distant, underscore why it’s good to learn from history.
True, I was referring to that REST API. I seldom see the Scripting block’s API referred to as “the API” or with any “API” reference at all, so I typically interpret any reference to Airtable’s “API” to mean the REST version.
I don’t think that they are — or ever have been — struggling. FileMaker is perhaps the most powerful cross-platform desktop & mobile database at its price point — with an almost unlimited ability to do nearly anything you want within its programming language. FileMaker’s sales grow every year. And they keep expanding its capabilities every year. And they continue to add tools to make it easy to communicate with other platforms as well. It’s insanely powerful.
Anything easier than writing lines of code from scratch! Airtable knows how to make things easy — they’ll figure it out. FileMaker has a beautifully simple & easy scripting language — yet its power can be unleashed if you want to unleash it.
But, it would be nice if someone with moderator privileges could spilt this thread in two as the discussion has taken quite a shift from the original intent.
