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AndrewLe's avatar
AndrewLe
Qrew Trainee
5 years ago

Lookup fields not populating data using table-to-table relationships

Hello all,

I am having trouble getting a table-to-table relationship to auto-populate some lookup data. The two tables that I am trying to connect are an Employee table and an Overtime Tracking table.

  • The employee table contains fields for employee ID#, name, business title, department etc etc.
  • The overtime tracking table contains fields for the year-to-date week, the overtime hours worked for that week, and the employee ID# for the employee who worked those hours. (This means that the same employee can appear on the table multiple times based on which week you're looking for)

I have created the relationship to connect the Employee table as the Parent table and the Overtime table as the Child table (since each employee has many overtime records, organized by YTD week #).

What I would like to do is to have the tables reference each other such that I can display business title (from the employee table) as an auto-populating field on the overtime table; and to be able to have each employee's form (on the employee table) being able to pull and display that employee's OT hours.

However, when I create the relationship, the overtime tracking table is not auto-populating the business title and department fields.

I'm trying to trouble shoot why the connection isn't working. Is there any specific settings or relation behaviors that I need to tune?

Thank you for any help you can provide.

3 Replies

  • It sounds like your child-Overtime records have not "populated" the related-reference field value that connects them to the parent-Employees table.

    Can you run a List All report in your Overtime table and check the [Related Reference] field value is populated correctly.  If not, this is your issue.  If it is; then look at each of your Lookup fields and make sure that the field is properly setup to view the data from the parent-Employee record from the relationship you have built.

    If you still do not see data; double-check that the data you are "looking up" actually exists in the Employees table for the employees where you have Overtime records.

    Post a screenshot if you can.
    • AndrewLe's avatar
      AndrewLe
      Qrew Trainee
      I looked at the child table's [Related Reference] field and found that it indeed doesn't not match the the parent table's [Reference Key] field; which, as you predicted, would explain why the LookUp fields are not populating correctly.

      Thank you very much for your advice.
  • Did you create the [Business Title] field directly in the Overtime table, or did you bring it in through the table-to-table relationship?  If you create it in the Overtime table, it's not linked to anything, but if you add it to the relationship (viewing the relationship, click the "Add Lookup Fields" button at the bottom of the right-hand pane), it appears in the child table and is automatically linked to the related field in the parent table.