Forum Discussion

AnayaSteward's avatar
AnayaSteward
Qrew Trainee
5 years ago

Populating A Reference Field When Parent Record Is Made After The Child Record

I posted this earlier but I didn't receive any feedback, but we've added a reference field to a child record that has already been submitted and we don't want to have to go back and manually fill in those reference fields for all the other child records that have been submitted. For example, let's say Appointments is the parent table, and Clients is the child. People have already submitted their Clients records, but we've recently added a reference field to the Client table and we want to autopopulate the corresponding Appointment record into that reference field. Is their any method or formula we could use to achieve this?

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Anaya Steward
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2 Replies

  • KirkTrachy1's avatar
    KirkTrachy1
    Qrew Assistant Captain
    Hi Anaya:

    I'm trying to understand your question.  As I read it, Appointments have many Clients.  You add all your clients but you haven't linked them to an appointment yet.  You then add an Appointment and you want all those previously added Clients to be linked to this new Appointment?

    If you want ALL the clients to be connected to a newly added Appointment, you could use an automation that says, whenever an Appointment record is added, edit the Client's records where the Record ID# > 0 and insert the Related Appointment field (I presume that is the reference field that links the Client back up to the Appointment.) to the value of the Appointment record's Record ID#.

    This is kind of an unusual use case.  Perhaps I'm not understanding and need more details?  If you did this, every time you added an appointment it would overwrite the Client's linked appointment.  I don't know your use-case and more detail will be helpful.

    We've just expanded our "Office Hours" webinars so they are now held each day at 1pm Eastern time.  Please pop in and we can work this out live.  You can register at http://quickbase.com/webinars/.

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    Kirk Trachy
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  • Hi Anaya,

    If I'm understanding your issue correctly, what you want to see happen is when you add a new parent record (Appointments), you want Quick Base to automatically relate it to any existing child records (Clients) for that parent.

    Two questions for you:
    1. In the Appointments table...beside the [Record ID#] field, is there a field that is unique to each appointment (like an [Appointment ID])? And
    2. Does that value exist currently exist anywhere in the Clients table?

    If the answer to both of these questions is yes - then we can easily accomplish this.  If the answer to either of these questions is no, then we may have our work cut out for us.  Let me know and perhaps we can find a solution

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    Freddie Sabbs
    Senior Solutions Consultant
    Quick Base
    fsabbs@quickbase.com
    Cambridge MA
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