Know what You are Doing with Proxy Fields
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009Â Â Â Â Almost every time you set up a relationship in QuickBase, a “proxy field” is created. That’s so when you pick a parent record, you see a dropdown that is meaningful to you.
   For example, if you have a relationship between Projects and Customers (one Customer to many Projects), the real relationship is between the Project and the Customer’s Number. But a Customer Number (1,2,3) is probably meaningless to you. What you really want to see is the Customer Name. So in a case like this, you want the Customer Name to be a proxy field in the relationship.
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   The Infamous Proxy Field - Should it be banned?
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 However, Proxy Fields are problematic. In the example above, if you had both the Customer Name field and the Related Customer field on the same form, they would cancel each other out and neither would work! And Proxy Fields can create problems when they are used for filtering records in a Report, too.Â
   At Data Collaborative, our general practice is not to use Proxy Fields. But we are QuickBase geeks - we eat and breathe this stuff. Our advice to you is this: pick one strategy and stick with it. If you use Proxy Fields, be careful about mixing a Proxy Field and a Lookup Field on the same form. If you don’t use Proxy Fields, learn how to use Record Picker fields to make the lookup dropdown have meaningful values.
   At Data Collaborative, our general practice is not to use Proxy Fields. But we are QuickBase geeks - we eat and breathe this stuff. Our advice to you is this: pick one strategy and stick with it. If you use Proxy Fields, be careful about mixing a Proxy Field and a Lookup Field on the same form. If you don’t use Proxy Fields, learn how to use Record Picker fields to make the lookup dropdown have meaningful values.
