Forum Discussion

SystemsBVI's avatar
SystemsBVI
Qrew Assistant Captain
8 years ago

Quickbase connected table - changing refresh key

Hi,
I am trying out connected tables (from quickbase to quickbase) but it appears that i cannot change the refresh key ? For ex, if my key field is Record ID, it by default chooses that as the refresh key too and doesnt allow me to change. 
This is a problem as i have the same table in multiple apps that i want to bring into a central instance. If the key field and refresh key fields are the record id, then records from different apps may stomp and overwrite each other. 
please let me know if it there's a different way short of changing the key field in the source table ? 
  • EvanMartinez's avatar
    EvanMartinez
    Quickbase Staff
    8 years ago
    For Quick Base to Quick Base Syncs since the Sync function is able to read what you have set as the key field in your source table you are correct that there is not a way to change the refresh key. It is designed to stick with the source key. I have seen some users with use cases like yours where an alternative refresh key would be helpful on a Quick Base to Quick Base Sync it just isn't a functionality in place currently. 

    As I often suggest in this instance I would encourage you though to include that feedback in our User Voice as an enhancement you would like to see for Sync. UserVoice is our Feedback Platform- which can most easily be accessed from the My Apps page in Quick Base by clicking on the orange Feedback tab that appears on the left hand side of the page or at http://quickbase.uservoice.com .  This forum is used by our development team to explore customer suggestions for enhancements / changes to the platform. Our Automation Team is always interested in hearing what functionality users would like to see in our features like Sync as we plan for future development. I'm sorry there isn't a native functionality I could suggest in this instance. 
  • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
    QuickBaseCoachD
    Qrew Captain
    6 years ago
    I have a client where we needed to consolidate into a single employee master, records from 5 different payroll systems.

    What we did is to create a field in the 5 source tables where we took the EE# and prefixed it with a Company identifier.  That way the Company-EE# would be unique even if there were two EE# with EE# 123.

    Then we set up 5 saved table to table imports to map the fields across into the Master table.

    Then an Automation to run the import each night.

    So the the only issue to deal with is if you need to delete employees who are no longer in the source table.  That could be done with a look-ups back to the source table to detect if the source record was deleted and then an Automation to delete Orphans.  An atternate appoach is to import 

    Today()

    Into a field called [Date EE last seen in Source].

    into the master and then for EE's who have an old value  in that field, say more than 1 week old they must have been deleted, so you could delete those Automatically with an Automation.