Introducing Dynamic Filtering of Linked Records

WOW! THANK YOU! THIS IS FREAKING AWESOME.

It is truly impossible to understate how HUGE this is, and how many years that we have all been patiently waiting for this!!

This is arguably the #1 most significant and #1 most important Airtable update in the entire history of Airtable.

Okay, automations and interfaces were pretty huge, too. 😉 So let's put this in 3rd place. 😉

But seriously, this is GIGANTIC.

This completely changes the entire landscape of Airtable for the best, and elevates Airtable to the same playing ground as other serious database languages!

THIS. IS. A. GREAT. DAY.

THANK YOU!

And, while we're on this topic of new features and linked record fields, there are a few smaller feature requests that my Airtable consulting clients would love to see as well:

(1) Linked record picker — the ability to search for a record based on any field, not just the primary field.

(2) Linked record field — the ability for the linked records to automatically sort within the linked record field by a specified value in another field.

(3) The ability for column headers in the grid view to wrap text so we don't need to have super-wide columns for just a checkbox field or a number field.

(4) The ability to conditionally color cells. (Currently, we only have a vertical bar of color in the left margin.)

Thank you for a fantastic product release and a fantastic day! 😃🙌

What a great year 2024 is shaping up to be for Airtable! 😃

- Scott Rose, Expert Airtable Consultant

———————————————

APRIL 2024 UPDATE:

Unfortunately, the Airtable community quickly realized that this feature was not as great as expected, because it is way too limited to be used in the majority of business needs.

For those of you who have been struggling with Airtable’s limitations on dynamic filtering of linked record fields — such as no support for formula fields, no support for single-select fields, no support for multi-select fields, no support for date fields, etc. — I wanted to let you know that there are at least 2 external products that can solve these problems for you:

1. Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and it is an advanced form replacement for Airtable that offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to dynamically & conditionally filter linked record fields based on ANY field type in your Airtable base and any data that was typed into your form.

Additionally, Fillout gives you the ability to update Airtable records from a form, the ability to display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable rollup fields & Airtable attachments & formulas on forms, the ability to perform math or other live calculations on your forms, the ability to accept payments on forms, the ability to have multi-page forms with conditional paths, the ability to create new linked records on a form, the ability to display as many fields as you want to see in a linked record selection list (including attachment fields), the ability to connect a single form to dozens of external apps, the ability to limit the number of linked records that can be chosen, the ability to upload an unlimited amount of attachments simultaneously, and much more.

2. Noloco’s advanced interfaces and portals for Airtable.

Noloco is an expensive product, but it offers extremely advanced interfaces and customer portals for Airtable, and every part of the entire product — from linked records fields to views to buttons to reports — can all be dynamically & conditionally filtered based on any Airtable fields that you would like. Noloco even offers conditional coloring of cells.

Personally, I love using Noloco with my Airtable consulting clients.

I give a brief demo of Noloco on this Airtable podcast episode, and I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable. The CEO of Noloco also gave a demonstration of his product on this BuiltOnAir podcast episode.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Congratulations Airtable and Community and @ScottWorld !

It's nice to know that the Team plan can be used as well.

I have tried it on a test BASE and use still seems very limited.
Could the type checking be the same as Automation?
Currently formula fields cannot be used.
Automation can be used as long as the output type of the formula field is the same.

The workaround is to update the field with the same type in Automation.
Please consider this, and thank you Airtable team.

Hello @carla11 and thanks for sharing, I've been waiting for this feature for approximately 8 years now 🥳.

Testing out Dynamic filtering in my sandbox base, may I ask what the consensus is for not allowing Single Select or Multi-select fields as dynamic filter fields? It's an unnecessary and big limitation to this amazing feature, so would like to understand why they're not currently working.

I had anticipated (and even programmed my own dynamic filtering using single/multi/linked fields with the Scripting Extension whilst waiting) the dynamic input field to support Single Select and Multi-select fields, along with Linked Fields and Lookup fields.

Are they still being considered for inclusion? Otherwise I suspect a lot of base administrators may have to convert their Single/Multi-select fields into tables to support this new feature... but with that, we lose all the features that Single/Multi-select fields bring to a base that are not found within a Linked Field (such as colours).

Second round of feedback, as I'm really starting to sink my teeth into this feature.

Focusing on numeric trickery for Dynamic Filtering, supported numberic Filter Dynamic Fields include;

• Look Up
• Count
• Number

When I use a Dynamic Filter with a Number filter, the Linked Field returns the expected records via their lookup filter value. However, Number Fields are not for my intended usage here, and are only used to cross check expected functionality.

So I change my Dynamic Field from Number (which has the value of "2") to the Look Up field which also returns a number value of "2". However, the Dynamic Field filter fails to parse this as a numeric number or is silently failing via some other means and either way does not return the expected dynamically filtered records (none are returned so none can be selected).

Frustratingly, I note users can't use a Calculation Field nor a Rollup Field for this Dynamic field check - but I don't understand why? Without these fields, a Dynamic Filter is absolutely limited in advance usage cases. Many of the things users had hoped to do for the past decade still effectively can't be done.

Thanks for the deep dive into this, @Karlstens! 

My bases don't have this new feature yet, so I haven't been able to test anything out yet — so thank you for testing on behalf of all of us! 😊

Sounds like you have discovered a few disappointing limitations with this new feature, and they sound like things that I would be disappointed by as well.

Hopefully, Airtable will take your feedback to heart and implement these feature requests.  😀

I also hope that Airtable will take to heart my 4 feature requests above, which are some of the features that my customers have been hoping for (in regards to linked record fields and the grid view):

(1) Linked record picker — the ability to search for a record based on any field, not just the primary field.

(2) Linked record field — the ability for the linked records to automatically sort within the linked record field by a specified value in another field.

(3) The ability for column headers in the grid view to wrap text so we don't need to have super-wide columns for just a checkbox field or a number field.

(4) The ability to conditionally color cells. (Currently, we only have a vertical bar of color in the left margin.)

Good morning,

Further problems that need addressing. If the referenced field is deleted (in my case, the # Number field), then the Linked field referencing that Number field as a dynamic filter flags a red alert symbol - which is fine. But when I go to address the error and remove the offending filter, Airtable crashes with the message "An error has occurred". The error message encourages the user to refresh the page, and upon doing so they lose the ability to undo the deletion of the previous fields, and now the field is corrupt, with the only way to fix it is to delete the Linked field with the corrupt Dynamic Filter and all its entered inputs.

Hello All,

This is huge. Big 👍 to all community guys.

After reading some of the comments, I see that there are still some options that are not there OR it needs to be polished more. But at least they implement it.

Looking forward to testing it and enabling more use cases based on it.

Thanks, but when will this feature be available within AT forms?

Nice, change, I first asked for this in 2018. I designed a script to accomplish this but was unsatisfied with the UX.  Alas, I've since moved on to another low code platform. This release 3 years ago would have had me stay with airtable, but it will take more than this to bring me back. All the best. 

Because of the way synced linked record fields are handled, this sadly doesn't work if the two linked tables in question are synced from somewhere else. We have a core base that syncs out People and Organizations (M:M btw them) to more special-purpose bases, so this does not address that case because the synced linked records are treated as text fields and so can't be compared.  

Holy cow, this is SUCH a welcome feature.  Big thank you to finally addressing the community's need. 🎉

However, I'm going to hold off on implementing it across my bases until we can get support for single/multi-select fields and the other limitations that prevent this from being as transformational as it should be.  Relying on static string matching is not a robust solution and I'd rather not introduce new failure points.

Will the team focus on implementing these features or should I not hold my breath?  

@Calvin_Young 

For those of you who have been struggling with Airtable’s limitations on dynamic filtering of linked record fields — such as no support for formula fields, no support for single-select fields, no support for multi-select fields, no support for date fields, etc. — I wanted to let you know that there are at least 2 external products that can solve these problems for you:

1. Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and it is an advanced form replacement for Airtable that offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to dynamically & conditionally filter linked record fields based on ANY field type in your Airtable base and any data that was typed into your form.

Additionally, Fillout gives you the ability to update Airtable records from a form, the ability to display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable rollup fields & Airtable attachments & formulas on forms, the ability to perform math or other live calculations on your forms, the ability to accept payments on forms, the ability to have multi-page forms with conditional paths, the ability to create new linked records on a form, the ability to display as many fields as you want to see in a linked record selection list (including attachment fields), the ability to connect a single form to dozens of external apps, the ability to limit the number of linked records that can be chosen, the ability to upload an unlimited amount of attachments simultaneously, and much more.

2. Noloco’s advanced interfaces and portals for Airtable.

Noloco is an expensive product, but it offers extremely advanced interfaces and customer portals for Airtable, and every part of the entire product — from linked records fields to views to buttons to reports — can all be dynamically & conditionally filtered based on any Airtable fields that you would like. Noloco even offers conditional coloring of cells.

Personally, I love using Noloco with my Airtable consulting clients.

I give a brief demo of Noloco on this Airtable podcast episode, and I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable. The CEO of Noloco also gave a demonstration of his product on this BuiltOnAir podcast episode.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

As always, really appreciate the kudos, thoughts, and feedback on our newly released features! The product team is taking this all as input into our roadmap to make Airtable a more holistic and robust solution for you all.

Hey all -

This is welcome news to see that this went live, and I had basically stumbled upon the Filtering when trying to:

1. have a "link to another record" (single line text type) called "category" to then display text items based on that "category" value in another "link to another record" - all the same types, but in the list of fields in the dynamic filter anytime the field is: single select, multi select, AND LINK TO ANOTHER RECORD - it doesn't show those fields. Why? The docs and this article clearly say LINK TO ANOTHER RECORD of same types is allowed...

2. I can do the same above and simply have a single line text field, manually type in the category values, and use that in the dynamic filter (which does appear as an option in the dynamic field area) and it works - YET THE DOCS say SINGLE LINE TEXT is not supported like that..

Is something broken?

I then went to use the Airtable Templates to try the above maybe using the RESOURCES template, but the dynamic filtering is not even where it appears in my bases...

NOTE: MY USE IS EXACTLY THE SAME EXAMPLE DEPICTED IN THE EXAMPLE POSTED HERE! THAT IS WHAT IS VERY BAFFLING e.g. Pick something from a list, then show options only related to that selection

Help...

David

UPDATE 4/28

So, I tried a new base and new tables and the example works as easily as the above example depicts!

There must be a bug in that what I originally was using -

1. table built from sync'ed data = not supported I found out later = and doing the example w fields in sync'ed tables = fail 😉 so ok.... see #2

2. then I unsync'ed the table of data in the base from the original tables in the other base thinking it would UNDO the sync or remnants of the original sync'age - so thus making it like standalone table data in the new base, but it obviously when it comes to the DYNAMIC FILTER fields available, still thought it was a sync'ed table or something = fail ... but as I found with a fresh from scratch example per above, it worked, so must be something with unsyncing originally synced data...

But, this works - skills in it's own table, driving to people, driving to tasksthen setting assignee only shows options based on "skillsrequired" here in tasks! Cool stuff!

Thanks @Kelly_OShaughne 

Has there been any news on when further refinements to dynamic filtering might be publicly available for use?

Also, is there a beta program available to test/comment on said refinements before going public?

@Karlstens additional improvements to dynamic filtering of linked records are currently in development and will be available in the next couple of months!

We won't have a Beta for these new features, but we will update the Community when we launch and keep an eye out for related product feedback. 

@Kelly_OShaughne 

One of the top 5 problems with this feature as it currently exists today is the inability to mix & match field types.

You can’t even mix & match a linked record field with a plain text field or a single-select field.

So if you want someone to choose the make of a car in one linked record field, and then have them dynamically choose the model of the car in the next linked record field, Airtable forces us to create two additional tables (instead of one additional table) to make this happen… for a grand total of THREE TABLES just to make dynamic linked records work properly.

Airtable requires us to create one table for car makes, and then Airtable requires us to create a second table for car models.

Then, Airtable requires us to link both of those new tables together.

All of this extra work & extra clutter to simply get dynamic linked records to work in the original (3rd) table.

What we should be able to do is simply have ONE ADDITIONAL TABLE (instead of two additional tables) that lists all the car makes & car models.

In this one additional table, one column would be a single-select field that lists car makes, and another column would be a single line text field that lists car models.

In other words, you would just have one additional table that is simply a flat list of all the car makes and car models: car makes in one column (single-select field) and car models in another column (single line text field).

As you scroll through this flat list of records in this one additional table, you would see the car makes repeated over & over again, but the car models would be different.

Just one flat list in one table.

Then, back in the original table, somebody would be able to choose the make of a car from the first linked record field, and Airtable would let them dynamically choose the model of the car from the second linked record field.

All of this would be controlled by the ONE additional table (the flat list) instead of TWO additional tables.

Even better, back in the original table, the first field shouldn’t even need to be a linked record field at all, but a single-select field itself., meaning that we could compare a single-select field in one table against a single-select field in another table, and then have one linked record field be filtered based on that.

This is the methodology that all other database & spreadsheet apps use: Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, Apple’s FileMaker Pro, SQL, Coda, Notion, Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, Noloco, Glide, JetAdmin, MiniExtensions, etc.

Hope this helps!

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant and Enterprise Database Programmer for 30+ years

Heads up for those of you following along for improvements to dynamic filtering, "Expanded Support for Dynamic Filters" is rolling out this week which lets you dynamically filter linked records based on more field types, including Select, Date, Formula, and Rollup fields!

This is incredible! Is there any chance that this will lead to dynamic filtering for rollup fields? That would be an absolutely game changer!