Ability to add new row in table A via editing the "add another link" filed of a row in table B

Hello Baserow team,

Problem

My use case is that:

  • I had created two tables in my database, one called “BOOKS” and another called “WRITERS”.
  • The “BOOKS” table stores bibliography records, including fields like author(s), publisher, ISBN number, etc., while the “WRITERS” table stores personal profiles, including fields like biography information, published works, etc.
  • The “author(s)” field in the “BOOKS” table is a link to table “WRITERS”; the “published works” field in the “WRITERS” table is a link to table “BOOKS”.

My problem under this use case is that, when I try to add an entry for a new book written by an unfamiliar writer (i.e. not yet existed in the “WRITER” table), what I have to do is to establish two incomplete entries (= rows) separately and manually: one in “BOOKS” (for the sake of elaboration, let’s assume this entry is On Liberty) and another one in “WRITERS” (J.S. Mill), then I have to edit these two entries to link them together.

Idea

I hope that, I can establish a new entry in the table “WRITERS” when I edit the field “author(s)” of the entry On Liberty in the table “BOOKS”, and name the newly created entry of “WRITERS” J.S. Mill, as the “author(s)” field is actually a “link to table (WRITERS)”.

By adding this feature, I can finish the creation of entry On Liberty uninterruptedly, make sure that the link (BOOKS → WRITERS) is established properly, and there would be a proper entry (row) in the “WRITERS” table so that I do not need to create from scratch.

Reference
This is an existing feature in Airtable. I hope that similar feature can be introduced in Baserow as well.

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Hi @wilsonkao, welcome to the Baserow community. Thanks for sharing your idea. I agree that it’s something that will make working in Baserow much more efficient. Multiple people have also requested this in the developer community as well. There already is an existing issue for that here Allow creating a new row when picking a "link to table" item (#350) · Issues · Bram Wiepjes / baserow · GitLab. You can track the progress in that issue. Because so many people have liked that it and because you have requested it here, I will try to squeeze it in next month. If that works, it will probably be released around the end of next month.

Hi @bram,

Just to confirm: is this feature already released? I have not seen it in the 1.10 release, and I’m wondering whether I misunderstand how to trigger it properly.

(It’s totally OK and understandable if this feature hasn’t been implemented yet. No mean to rush. I appreciate your work and totally understand that priorities may change and task force is very limited.)

Hi @wilsonkao, this feature has unfortunately not been released. It didn’t make it in the 1.8 release. We’re probably going to work on it in the upcoming months, I can’t give you a more concrete timeline.

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