Help with structure strategy involving reference attribution and automatic back-reference

[ashley]

Hey guys,

Hoping you all can help me out again! I am trying to convert over from Airtable and I have a good bit of experience with relational databases, so I’m having trouble switching my thinking on some points. I am creating a Board to track my family’s RV travels. Here’s the structure I’ve got so far…

Folders:

1 - Trips
2 - Waypoints
3 - Reservations

Reservations reference waypoints, which will allow us to record visits to the same place more than once.

Trips reference waypoints AND reservations - I will use the list waypoints to create an itinerary of sorts, and the reservations will, obviously, hold the reservation details for a particular trip.

Here’s where things get tricky…

I’d like to link waypoints together so that when we visit, for example, a state park, we will also have a handy list of nearby attractions. So in my Waypoints folder, I included a reference attribute that I will use to “link” waypoints to each other.

The problem is the automatic back-reference. Here’s an example:

I want to link “Cajun Palms RV” with “Prehistoric Park.” I open the prehistoric item and add the reference under “Local Attractions” attribute. Flip to the Cajun Palms item and there is now a “Local Attractions” attribute AND the back-reference simply called “Waypoints”

So this is not really accomplishing what I’d like because I end up with 2 fields instead of one field with a list of linked items. Any ideas on an alternate structure / implementation I could try?

[coa]

Hey @ashley,

I like the use case very much.

Hmm. So I guess the problem is that the ‘back-reference’ is redundant in this case?

Do you think that ‘hiding’ back-reference could be enough in this case? You can do that by clicking on the ‘Customize’ configuration option.

Also, if it bothers you in the item modal (when you expand an item), you can simply drag & drop it to the bottom?

[ashley]

Hi coa, Thanks for the reply! So, using your suggestion and following my current process, here’s what I end up with:

Prehistoric Park:
Local Attractions: Cajun Palms RV

Cajun Palms RV:
Local Attractions: [blank]
hidden Back-Reference: Prehistoric Park

I would call this a one-sided link, meaning I can see the link from only one of the linked items - in my case, I can access cajun palms from prehistoric park, but not vice versa.

I suppose I could hide both back-reference fields and then create the link in both directions with the Local Attractions attribute, but this is certainly redundant.

Unless anyone else has a suggestion, this may be my only option until updates are made to the reference fields. I think I read something about changes coming… somewhere… ???

[coa]

Hey @ashley,

That could be one of the solutions, for now.

Yes, new changes and updates are coming to Reference attribute very soon

Thank you.