Anyone had a situation where a website uses multiple collections with multiple references, that need a scalable system?
For example, we have a collection for consultants, jobs, and blogs, and a consultant can be referenced to the job and blog as an author. However, sometimes these consultants will go away, and need to be removed from the website, but this is not possible as they are referenced to other collections, so the only way is to remove the reference manually from all other items, and then delete the consultant, which is not sustainable.
That’s a pretty standard database issue in general, especially with relational databases- which the Webflow CMS mimics in some respects.
Unfortunately as you mentioned, multirefs aren’t “exposed” in a separate cross-reference table that you can just query and delete.
In your example, the simple approach is to archive the consultant and republish. The consultant record will still exist, and so will the refs to it, but they’ll be indicated as archived like this, and won’t emit in multiref-bound collection lists.
If you really want to remove the data you’d need to do it manually, or else you could build an automated system through the API that knows your schema and can remove the refs first.
Another approach is to look at managing your entire CMS inside of Airtable, and then use Whalesync or another sync platform to update the CMS.