How to use a join table in Bubble?

I have two dropdown menus of loudspeaker brands. One of category Main and one of category Sub. To populate these menus I have created three tables: category, brand, and category_brand. I’m struggling to figure out how the join in done in Bubble.

My first thought was to set the dropdown menu’s source to the join table, then just filter by category, but I can’t figure out how to do that.

Can you try using “Do a search” option in the constraint and search for brand and see if that helps.

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if you don’t have any other meta data in the ‘brand_category’ thing, you could make ‘category’ a list in the ‘brand’ thing. That might make searching/filtering easier.

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Yeah, making lists seems to be more up the Bubble alley.

I think that worked. Thank you!!

Awesome! I came from a SQL background so rewiring my brain away from that and into “how bubble does it” took some time. I do still use join tables for some things as I want to store additional meta data but it’s a pain due to no FK/PK contraints so you need to be vigilant about (sometimes) complex “do search for” and relying on counts to make sure you don’t get duplicates.

With lists, Bubble won’t allow you to add the same thing in a list twice as far as I can tell.

Agree 100%. Need vigilance using Do a Search for.
Duplicates or slow loading times are the byproduct of complex searches.
I use them only for simple searches and rid duplicates by using the unique condition.