Feature request - Look up List

Most people manually create a column of options based on unique items from a reference column. This is used for many things, like choices in choice components.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a ‘Look up List’ definition that populated the cells in that column with unique values from the reference. Ideally it would come with a sort option and some nice filtering options.

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I don’t really understand what you mean. Where would this list come from, and where would the data reside? (if not in a column in a table)

If I column A was a list of cells containing text (say countries) generated by user entries and I wanted column B to duplicate that list but with a filter for unique entries.

Does that help?

This would allow an inline list to be created based on Column B. And yes, column B would reside in a Glide table.

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ah, okay. Yeah, I get what you mean (I think).

It’s actually already possible to do this. Check this post from @Jeff_Hager

I’ve used the technique he describes there to generate a unique list for a choice component, and it works a charm :+1:

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Thanks Darren - good to see the workaround solution from Jeff.

Since it requires some juggling and knowledge of relations with pitfalls along the way (‘multi match’) wouldn’t it be great if this was all available in one new feature? I’m sure the vast majority of users would benefit.

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Yeah, what you’re getting at here is having the ability to define conditional relations. This is something that several people have been asking for.

Edit: For example…

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I think I see where you are going with this. Unrelated to the conditional relations request, but I’d like to see a way to create an entire glide table from from a combination of columns in another table. Right now I have a sheet built with a combination of UNIQUE and QUERY formulas to get a unique list of students taught by a specific coach within a certain date range. This dynamically built sheet is the driver for the billing, invoicing, and payment tracking. It would be awesome if I could eliminate the entire sheet from the google side and have it built dynamically within glide.

I probably could use my method linked above, but I think I lose some ability to have separate screens if one sheet begins to have dual purposes.

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