I am building a parade management platform and ran into something I never really thought about until I ran into this scenario. The parade is divided into divisions (1-5) and in each division there are lineup positions (1-30+).
Once participants are assigned a division and a lineup position, If things change and you want to add someone into the lineup or move them around, there is really no good way to add or remove them and shift all the others up or down without manually renumbering every participant one by one.
I thought about a Kanban, but the current Kanban blocks are really impractical for this scenario. The beta version looks promising but doesn’t work, but even if it did, you could add someone to a position but it doesn’t really re-arrange all the other ones.
Trying to think how I could have a formula in another row to keep things sorted, nothing is coming to mind.
My only other idea is to add a sub-category a,b,c… (Div 1, Lineup 3, Sub a, b, c, etc.. so I can add someone to the same lineup position as someone else but use the sub-category to keep them in the correct line up order.
Anyone else dealt with something similar and have a suggestion?
You could use decimals, perhaps?
So you have positions 1-30(+) … if you want to move someone into position 5 then you give them position 4.5 … this then positions them fifth in the sort order, and the person with the number five becomes sixth in the sort order, and so on. If there is then another person needing to slot in at fifth position, they would be given 4.4.
You would have a field “sort index” and another one “position”. “Sort index” ends up with decimals in it, and “position” would be calculated or derived integers based on “sort index” (sorted in order).
Depending on how frequently you need to do this, you could use an Airtable/Softr automation to re-index everyone and make them integers once more, before you start working with mid-way decimals once again.
Hope this is a help to you.
Ultimately, went with the sub-position. a, b, c, d, e. A little clunky but it got the job done. Never heard of or considered indexing.
When things are in Airtable, right next to the key field is always a number for it’s position in the view. I suppose that is called an index number? When records are updated (in a certain view), if I had an automation that changed the position number assigned to that index number, that would get the job done.
There will be another parade next year.. so I’ll continue looking for a fix. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look into it more.
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