Connected tables: Is it possible to set up a connection with 20 tables channeling data into one connected table?

Thank you for the response!

I'm not sure Quick Base Actions are the best solution because we need to not just add records to the centralized table but also modify/delete them when the corresponding record in one of the 20 tables is modified/deleted. Is it possible to do this with a QuickBase Action?

And for the "formula to link back to the original document," what formula would you use?

The centralized table could have a relationship back to each of the 20 source tables. So 20 relationships. Then it could self detect if the Parent was deleted and either be hidden from reports or deleted by an Action or automation.

That could also be useful to use a lookup for any Text fields on the source records, that way you would not need to deal with edits by Actions as they would just be lookup fields.

The formula URL to display a clickable link to a file attchment in another table is like this

URLRoot() & "up/" & [_DBID_PROJECTS] & "/a/r" & [Related project] & "/e30/v0"

Replace e30 with e and fid of the field holding the file attachment. The v0 just says to always show the most recent version if the attached file.

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You can get this working once and do all your testing and write down the steps.

Then take say 2 hours max to replicate this 19 more times. Note also that you can �Copy Table�. That can save a bit of time.

I appreciate the idea. But it seems that now we are straying away from the main goal.

Originally, I wanted to gather records from all 20 tables into one centralized table with the goal of running a report using the filter "<some attached file> contains the word <ask the user>." But with your idea I would have a field of links, not file attachments. These would not be searchable.

Do you know of a way to go around this?

The link would appear as the name of the file and hence quite searchable. 

But the file attachment (the content within the file attachment) will not be searchable on the centralized table.

Oh, so you want to search to content of the file attachments and not just the name.  That is a showstopper.

your original post said this

"report that searched the file attachment field using "contains the value <ask the user>" filter."

I assumed that you meant the file name and not to search the content of the file attachments themselves.

>That is a showstopper.

Hardly.

>Do you know of a way to go around this?

With script you could just create 20 hidden <iframe>s with the individual file content search results and then just scrape out the results and display the final result in a tabular format on the host page. The net result would appear as a single report on the host page spanning all 20 tables of documents. 

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, I am trying to search the content of the file attachments. Is there a native-to-Quick-Base way of gathering all the file attachments on one table, a table that updates automatically, to achieve that?

In response to the <iframes>s, I can't quite picture how the report would work. When you say "individual file content search results," are you imagining one search bar at the top of the hosted page that would then show the results below as a single report (even though they are 20 individual <iframe>s)? And how labor intensive would it be to set this up?