Field Agent to Ignore Blank Fields

Hmm, I’m kind of curious about the workflow.  Is it that when one of the fields gets cleared you want the Field Agent to run and review all 3 fields again and you can’t get that to work? 

If so, perhaps you could try using an automation that triggers whenever any of the 3 fields are updated instead with a ‘Generate text’ action

Might be simpler to just create a new option called ‘Blank’ or something and tweak your prompt to handle that though

Yeah, sorry, I could have been clearer:

It’s a project management table in which projects can be sent into the table either by form submission, emailed in, or another -different- form submission (long story, don’t ask haha). So that’s three entry points into the table. Each of the three entry points will create a record and populate it’s own single field of data in the record. So, for example, Form A is submitted, a record is created, and populates “Form A Description” field, OR if Form B is submitted, a record is created, it will populate “Form B Description” field, OR if a project is emailed in, a record is created, it will populate “Email Description” field. Sadly, they do need to be separate fields and I can’t just have all three entry points populate the same one field and ask a Field Agent to always look at that one field.

So, I wanted an Field Agent to check all three fields, find the populated one, and decide which project type was being submitted from a multiple select option of project types.

I’m open to easier ways of accomplishing this as well! Thanks in advance!

Out of curiosity: is there any reason why you can’t have the Airtable-native form include a question that simply prompts the submitter to identify what kind of project type it is? You could then automate that to be effectively copied into the unified multi-select field, which would mean fewer AI agent runs overall. If you have edit capabilities on the external form, I’d do the same there. 

(If the project types in the multi-select are internal identifiers that wouldn’t necessarily be intuitive for the people submitting project requests—I totally get it and you can pretend I didn’t even ask this, lol)

Hi ​@avfreedman, thank you for the detailed description that helped me to understand the issue.
Reading through it my approach would be to have a formula field called “Unified From Description” or something similar which does the comparison.

Then use the field agent on this unified field which will never be empty.

This would be the formula:
 

IF({Form Description A}, {Form Description A},
  IF({Form Description B}, {Form Description B},
    IF({Form Description C}, {Form Description C}, BLANK())
  )
)

Would that work in your case? :)

Best,

Richard

Thank you, Richard! This works perfectly for me. I appreciate your help with this!

Haha, you are correct. The project types aren’t something the people filling out the form would understand so we’re doing it on the backend.

> Curious if there’s a way to get a Field Agent to ignore blank fields?

Yes. You can make the fields optional. 

1. edit the AI field definition and look at the prompt

2. in the prompt, click on the field you want to leave blank

3. choose “Make Optional”

Optional fields will display with a dotted line around them.

For example, you might prompt something along the lines of  “I am going to give you some information to process. If the information is blank, then just output a blank. Otherwise, handle the information as follows (put your instructions here). The information for you to process is: [optional field 1] [optional field 2] [optional field 3].” 

Having said that, Richard’s formula field is far better than a field agent for your use case.

Wow! Thank you so much for this information. I can’t believe I missed that. If you think Richard’s is the better option, I’ll stay with that but will try yours out as well— just so I understand it better for future applications. Thank you again!