4 level roll-ups - can this be done?

App Development
1

Hi all - trying to figure out if this can be done.

Simplified question as follows: I have an App with 4 levels of nested tables - Parents, Children, Grandchildren, Great-Grandchildren. Each “child” has a one-to-one Connection to the respective “parent” level above. Let’s also assume each record in each table has the person’s age (years as an integer).

If I want to roll-up (Sum) the ages of the Parent’s children (1 level down) - easy in a table a/o by creating a roll-up field in the Parent table.

If I want to roll-up the ages of the Parent’s grandchildren (2 levels down) I can do this with a table, but doesn’t look like I can create a roll-up that goes two levels deep.

If I want to roll-up the ages of the Parent’s great-grandchildren (3 levels down) - no luck, I can’t figure this out. I did create a “pre-rolled” field at the grandchildren level (grandchildren roll-up of their great-grandchildren’s ages) but I’m limited on how I can roll-up the roll-ups at the Parent and Children level’s above.

So question is - if I have tables nested more than two levels deep, is there any way to use the Roll-up a/o Sum functions? As a data modeling exercise, I don’t think there’s any limit on rolling up nested tables X levels deep, so maybe this is a Tadabase limitation?

Anyone have thoughts on how to make this work? Any workarounds out there using additional fields / additional tables / additional formulas?

Thanks all for any / all help!

2

@DJ_Cosmo -

I have been working on an application with a similar rollup need. However, after speaking with TB staff, this concept exceeds the capabilities of the current platform without working outside of TB with API calls.

IOW, it can’t be done natively in TB at this time.

Sorry,
Adam

3

Hi All,

Any solution to this 2 years on, I also need to use multi-depth values in filters with the connection back to itself, Rollup would be great if it did more than just the current level?

Thanks

Dan

4

BTW, as I look at back at this a few years later, the solution (albeit clunky and slow) was to do 2-level roll-ups, and then roll those up again. So basic nested “roll-ups of roll-ups”. This worked fine, but made it very slow to add / update bottom level (great-grandchild) records.

Good news is that the improvements to the calc engines GREATLY sped this up and the slow implementation is workable now.

So a compromise on something that a full-blow SQL query could handle quite easily - but I guess that’s one of the trade-offs of a no-code platform so there you go.

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