New to Baserow and coming from MS Access. I’m an intermediate Access user, but not a “coder”.
I don’t understand why in Baserow you have to link a table and then, one by one (after adding another field to your table), select the records you are linking to in another table. Why can’t you just select the two fields you are joining and call it a day?
Even with the existing awkward (to me) method, why can’t you at least have a formula in the linked table field you are forced to create so that it can reference another field and auto-populate?
I feel like I HAVE to be missing something obvious, but I have yet to find it.
I’m not so familiar with Access but as far as I understand it, Access simply matches records together through queries (like a formula) using primitive values such as text/numbers (like a spreadsheet). This is indeed very different from how Baserow does it which is creating an explicit relationship between records. Baserow’s method optimises for data integrity whilst Access’s method optimises for query flexibility.
You could still do this programatically in Baserow through the API but it would still require a very different approach than what you may be used to in Access.
Underneath it all, it’s still just a SQL Join right?(no idea…just guessing) So I don’t see why you can’t have both. When I have one table with an ID, and another with the same ID, literally manually connecting them one-by-one seems wild to me.
I have no idea how this would work with transactions. For example, If I get 1000 sales transactions a day(records/rows), would I really need to go click into every transaction and link it to an item detail table (for example)? Is baserow just not designed for transactional information? Is it more of a static, small dataset solution?
Hi @Allllan, as mentioned before - you could certainly still achieve what you wanted programatically through Baserow’s API. But this woudl require you to set up those workflows externally using automation platforms such as n8n/Zapier/Make. We are building out an automation tool natively in Baserow and the first version of this should be avaialble next quarter.