filemaker pro 18 advanced add unique key to each record

#FILEMAKER PRO 18 ADVANCED ADD UNIQUE KEY TO EACH RECORD FREE#

The unique primary key value for each record guarantees this uniqueness but doesn’t in any way characterize it. Whether you’re working in Airtable or FileMaker (or any other database system), within a given table, each row should represent a unique instance of some thing (‘entity’). Unfortunately, calling this column ‘Name’ by default leads, I think, to some confusion. The Name column is how Airtable protects casual users from the abstractions involved in database design (like ‘entity’).

Once you get used to it, you’ll probably find as I have that a lot of stuff that takes some work in FileMaker is easy as pie in Airtable. If you’re coming from FileMaker Pro (like Tim or like me), Airtable’s handling of relationships takes a little getting used to.

#FILEMAKER PRO 18 ADVANCED ADD UNIQUE KEY TO EACH RECORD FREE#

It’s been a very long day! Feel free to reach out to me either here or via email ( if you need anything else. (Again, you’ll never see the primary keys that Airtable is really using.) The nice thing about this is that you can change a record’s name value, and any relationships that the record is involved in will be maintained. In Airtable, when you relate records from one table to another, it is the “name” field that you use to select a related record. You can even setup a name column so that it acts in a way similar to the auto-increment fields that we often use in FileMaker databases. For example, you can change the column’s name, its type, and so on. You can change the name field if you’d like.

The “name” field is sort of like an alternate primary key, which, as users, we can see and use to identify records in a more user-friendly way.

You won’t normally see those values in the Airtable interface, but if you poke around in the API, you will see how they are used. Behind the scenes, each record is assigned a UUID, and it is that value which Airtable really uses as the primary key. With Airtable, all of that is done for you. Normally, we have to explicitly specify a primary key on a table, so that we can setup relationships to it from other tables. The “name” field can be a little confusing for those of us coming from database platforms such as FileMaker. Welcome to Airtable - and I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying it.

Filemaker pro 18 advanced add unique key to each record