Changing the name of a "parent" record unlinks "child" records

Bugs
1

Just had a really strange behaviour reported by one of our users which seems to be caused by Noloco as the same behaviour doesn’t occur if the changes are made in Airtable instead.

We have a table for sites and there is a self-linking field as some locations may have sub-locations (e.g. Gatwick Airport is a parent site with each terminal as a sub-location).

For some reason if the users for example rename Gatwick Airport to Gatwick Airport South all of the linked sub-locations are unlinked. This behaviour does not occur if you rename the record through Airtable instead of Noloco.

Is there any reason for this and if so can we prevent it? This isn’t expected behaviour and I can’t really think of any reason anyone would want this to happen.

2

How did they rename the record?

Unless you’re relying on an Automatic Link then I would be very surprised if this was the case actually.

Can you see in the Airtable activity log that they wer unlinked, and by whom?

3

Hey @darragh,

Just by editing the text field inline on the record details page.

No automatic link is used, but the actual primary field in AT is a formula field which uses the location name provided by the user + the country code if that might have any bearing?

Now this is really interesting… I think have discovered the issue as the Airtable activity log doesn’t actually show them being linked or unlinked and in fact I have just linked a new sub-location to a site and it shows the change in Noloco but not in Airtable… Digging into the Noloco data it seems that it has created an additional field “sub-locations reverse collection” and it is creating the link on this field but not the other “sub-locations collection” field which is why it isn’t syncing to Airtable. Though still not quite sure why it is losing the link when renamed… (I assume it triggers a re-sync with AT, sees there are no linked sub-locations and disregards what it has set in the reverse collection?)

4

Sounds like it could be a simple field name conflict, can you send me a link to the table and the names of the fields involved
It’s usually a simple fix in that case.

The reason I’m so confident that changing the name of a record wouldn’t unlink them is because we do everything based on IDs and not names, so the two are quite separate

Thanks

5

No problem, here’s the table.

The users edit the “Location” field which in turn updates the “Name” (formula) field.

The linked record field is “Sub-Locations” but when linking records via this page it instead updates the “Sub-Locations reverse collection” field. When editing the “Location” field these links are lost.

1 Like
6

Is there any I can test with, or do you mind if I test with that one, for example?

7

You can test with that one

1 Like
8

Thanks Luke - we know exactly what’s going on, and it’s related to using link/unlink on Self-linked tables in Airtable.

What I would suggest is to disable that, and instead use an action button to edit the ‘Locations’ field

This won’t cause the same issues you’re seeing

We’re going to try patch this but I don’t have a timeline at the moment.

Thanks

9

Thanks Darragh, no problem I’ll make the suggested changes.

Would you be able to update me when the issue is solved please?

Thanks

10

Of course - we’ve linked it to this conversation, so we’ll update here when we have a fix in place.

Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for working with us through this

1 Like