Create a multi-select field whose options equal all item names in a database

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1

I’m creating a Personnel database for my company. Let’s say it has three items:

  • Bob
  • Joe
  • Tom

One of the multi-select fields in this database is “Manages”. I want the options to equal all item names in the database. i.e., “Bob”, “Joe”, “Tom”. Thanks.

2

Hey! Good to see you on here Keith.

Best solution here would be to add a “self-relation”: Fibery

Same way you can set “Parent Doc” and “Sub Docs”, you can set a set relation for “Managing” and “Managed by”.

It’s not exactly what you asked, but I think it solves the root problem you’re going for. Let me know if I understood it wrong though!

3

Hi Ron. Thanks for sharing. Yes, that creates a field that lets be choose users from the owning database, but UI-wise I’d prefer to stick with the multi-select field, so it looks like I’ll be manually adding the multi-select options I need. No worries though.

4

If you like the UI of a multi-select, you can still follow @RonMakesSystems’s advice and create a self-relation, but then choose to display the collection field as one of the upper fields on entity view.

If that’s still not good enough, would love to hear what you like about multi-selects that you don’t get with a relation.

5

Thank you! Yeah, that’s a great tip. Though I’m not clear on why these self-relations have to create additional fields. I renamed the Personnel duplicates to reference the fields they’re associated with, and then hid them. (They’re not hidden below.)

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6

You don’t need to create the relationship twice. If you have a single relationship, you can name one field ‘Manages’ and the other ‘Managed By’.
If you then look at Bob’s entity view and decide to set Joe as one of the people he manages, when you look at Joe’s entity view, you will see that Bob is already marked as who he is managed by.