QuickBase Straight Up

The “Report” field type is one of the most powerful tools in QuickBase, but it is rarely used because most users do not understand it. This is not the easiest QuickBase task - some users may have some difficulty here. But if you have some experience with Quickbase under your belt, you should be able to pull it off.

 

Let’s say that your company dispatches technicians to work at stores. Sometimes they work at Burger King, sometimes they work at WalMart, sometimes they work at Starbucks. You might have one table for customers (like Starbucks), and a child table with sites (all the Starbucks franchises). When you are getting ready to dispatch a technician to a Starbucks in (say) Minneapolis, you might want to see what other customers also have sites there — perhaps your technician could take care of two jobs in one trip.

You can see this application at https://www.quickbase.com/db/bdz636bms.

Regular QuickBase relationships will not help you here. The site’s city cannot be the key field in that table (since many sites could have the same city), so you cannot create a relationship based on city.

 

However, you can create a “Report” field which will fill the need. In this example, you would click on the Sites table, then Customize, Fields, then Create New Field. The new field could be called “Nearby Sites”, and the field type is Report Link. After you create the field, you need to give it some more information — you need to tell it what you want it to report on. 

So click on Sites–>Customize–>Fields–>Nearby Sites.  You want to find Sites with the same City as whatever site the user is looking at. So on the Field Definition page, under Report Link Options, you will pick “City” as the Source Field.

Next, you have to select what table you want to report on. In this case, you are reporting on the same table - Sites. So click on the “Select Target” button. First it wants to know what application you are reporting on — you would select the same application that you are in already. Next, it wants to know what field corresponds to the City — and in this case, it is the same field, City.

That’s all you really need to do for setting up the field. But there are two more things to do so it will display right. 

 

If you include this field on a form, you will just see the city name - not the related sites. So customize that form, and on the “Nearby Sites” line, click on “Display the related sites directly on the form”. Then in “Base the Display on Report”, you can select a report that shows the fields you want to display. Note that the list will also include the current site in the list, since it is in the same city as itself!

As I said, this is a little tricky. But in the end, you have a very powerful tool — and if you do this once, you’ll probably see many more opportunities where it can come in handy, too.