QuickBase: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Creating Relationships Between Tables

In the real world, relationships can be pretty complicated—just ask anyone who has an older sibling. In QuickBase, luckily, relationships actually make your life easier. After all, the tables in your applications have a lot to talk about—they live in the same neighborhood, they hold related information, they might even share a couple of fields. Table relationships get your tables talking—and make your work easier. This chapter explains everything you need to know about creating and using relationships between tables in a QuickBase application—or even between two tables in different applications.

How Table Relationships Work

In the world of QuickBase, a relationship is a link between two tables—a record in one table links up with one or more records in another table. For example, suppose you’re using QuickBase to keep track of tasks in a project. So you create a Tasks table. For each task you add, you also list information about the person who’s assigned the task: name, email, phone number, and so on. At first, this works out great. But later, as you assign multiple tasks to the same people, you get tired of having to add the same employee information to the Tasks table over and over again. Besides, your Tasks table is getting hard to read with all those extra fields thrown in. You’d rather have it focus on tasks, priority levels, due dates—things like that.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a separate table that stores relevant data ...