I love the ability to link multiple items to one item through the connect boards column, and in combination with the mirror column, it can effectively sum number columns of items of your choosing (those linked to said main item) to give a filtered sum that can then be used in a formula and that is awesome! I would, however, love to see this feature be added as an automation though as manually adding the right items can be confusing and mistakes can happen.
Currently there is an automation where, when a trigger happens, a new item is added to a board and the new item and the item that triggered the automation become linked. It would be awesome if, when a trigger happens, that item and another item that is chosen become linked. This way multiple items can be stacked.
As for use cases, it would be a clean solution for the ability to add values across items, like adding vertically. It would also help with the ability to update inventory, as well as cost and pricing for filtered products based on a status (by using a status as the trigger).
In my case, I am looking to take the orders from my order board, each with a “product type” using a status column and an “amount of product used” using a numbers column, and connect them, based on product type, to my inventory board, where each item in that board represents a different product type. Currently, I can manually link each “order” item to the associated “product type” item using the connect boards column. Then I can use the mirror column on the “amount of product used” to sum all of those order’s values, thus giving the total amount used of that particular product. And because, that mirror column is a cell (unlike the summary) I can use formula columns to find out how much product if have left, how much profit gain, etc.
Now if there is another way to do this, I would be happy to give it a try, groups would work, if the summary could be used in a formula or used in another item, but that isn’t the case.
The end goal is to have a number for each product that is the amount of product left and is found by adding up the amount of product used for a specific product. Sorry for the wall of text.