Feature Request: Ability to add a link in one record to a different record

[Jpok]

I don’t know if this has been requested, probably because I don’t know what to call it. It might be considered “relational” capabilities, but from the other post about “relational”, it doesn’t seem to be the same thing.

It would be nice to be able to add a Field in a Form Template which allows linking to another form’s records. For example, I have a template called “Orders”, and another one called “Credit Cards”. When creating a new “Orders” record, it would be nice to have a field (let’s say it uses the name of the Form Template that it’s linking to) called “Credit Cards”. While creating a new “Orders” record, I could then click the field called “Credit Cards”, which would give me a list of all of the records in that Form (i.e. I would see: Discover, Visa, Mastercard, etc). After choosing one of the records, it would bring me back to the new record (“Orders”) that I was creating. Let’s say I had chosen “Visa” in the last step. Now “Visa” shows in the new field, but with an arrow on the right side (similar to how Contacts-linking works, but only with record-linking instead). When tapping the arrow, a new screen would come up with all of the details of the “Visa” record. Tapping “Back” would go back to the previous record that I was editing.

I’m sorry, did that make any sense? It was a little difficult for me to explain.

The reason why I thought of this is because I run into this exact problem while using my “Orders” form. I try to have everything on that one page so I don’t have to go looking all over for it when it’s time to do the order. Since we can already link to contacts, I don’t even have to search for the contact number, because it’s already on my form. But, when it’s time to get the credit card number, I have to leave the record that I’m working on, go back to the “Credit Cards” template, choose the credit card that I want, read the info, then go all the way back to the “Orders” record that I was working on.

I’m sure there’d be many other uses too for such a feature. Not only would it be useful to be able to link to records in other form templates, but also to link in the same form template would be useful as well. For example, let’s say I wanted to make a new order, but in addition to the new items, I wanted to add all of the contents of an order I made last week. In the new order, I would add a link to the previous order, and then I’d have all of the necessary information without leaving the original order.

Final example, someone has a “Recipes” form (like I do). Let’s say we have a recipe for “gravy”, and another one for “mashed potatoes”. The “mashed potatoes” record could have a link in it for the “gravy” recipe. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Mmmmm, must be lunch time now…

Sorry if I wrote too much, or if I didn’t write well.

Thanks!

[Brendan]

Your description of a relational field type is exactly how I want to implement relational fields.

However, are they to-one, to-many’s, or many-to-many relationships?

It can get quite complex to provide all three options.

Also, if you click the Feedback button on the left side of my website on each page, you can see what other people have been requesting on my feedback page. If you had searched for relational, you would have seen that this feature was requested before. But I don’t think anyone else has explained it as well as you did, so I thank you for that.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Author]

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