I’m not sure if this is a bug or a dangerous use of cross-doc, but I have a cross-doc table A, that I create a View B out of, which simply applies a filter to only show certain rows from table A.
I cannot use table B as a Lookup in other tables, it does not show up in the list of table options for the Lookup column settings. I’ve tried this with a couple cross-doc tables and seems to be consistent behavior.
I can work around this by creating the view in the source doc that table A comes from, and then additionally cross-doc import that View, however I’d like to avoid that in general since the source document shouldn’t have to create views for external docs that want to use its data in certain ways.
I found a better solution for my use case, but I’ll leave this open as a potential bug.
I found that Lookup columns have filters under the Item Settings!
And more importantly the lookup filter only applies while selecting items, it keeps previously selected items properly if the no longer appear in the filter:
Hey Ed, thanks for your post! I think the issue here is that you cannot search for views when creating a look-up column. The look-up column will only provide source tables as an option, similar to the list of tables in the doc map.
Since tables & views are connected, pointing towards the source table will perform the same exact action and you’ll need to re-apply the filters separately via the lookup column options anyway. Ideally, the base table should remain unfiltered with all filters applied to views instead to avoid missing results in your search. This same principal goes for filter formulas and automations as well (you need to point them at unfiltered source tables to ensure you’re getting all relevant results). Hope this helps!
