Generating mass lists and checking for duplicates/remove mass update list
Hi all,
We are trying to do this:
(1) We have an activities list where we generate invitations to events (so we can track who accepted/rejected). Each invite contains one contact, and the events have their own.
(2) We are making an automation whereby when you generate a list of contacts (under the “event” table where people can add a lot of people/contacts)
Generating the invitations by automations is possible for us but our challenge is:
How do we check for duplicates in the list of invitations (under activities) (i.e. when it pushes through and generates these invitations in the activities table, how do I make the automation search that the contact in my mass list is not already there)?
Thanks in advance!
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You can handle this by putting a check before creating a new activity.
Your automation runs through each contact in the event’s contact list.
Before creating a new activity (invitation), it searches the Activities table for a record where the contact AND the event match.
If a match is found, the automation skips that contact. If no match is found, it creates the invitation.
Sigh yeah this is always a bit of a headache. I’ve got two workarounds for this, one that uses up a lot of automation runs but is easier to wrap ones head around, and another that uses fewer but is more convoluted
The easy one (which I’ve set up here for you to check out with the automations) involves creating a formula field that’ll output a unique value per contact that’s been added by combining it with the event name, so something like this:
And you then get the automation to paste that text value into the Invitations field. This will then either link to an existing record with that primary field value, or create a new one:
After that you’ll have another automation that’ll help you link the invitations to each contact, and we do that by:
Creating a formula field to get the contacts name
Using an automation to paste that into the linked field to Contacts
Ideally you’d want to use the Contact record ID instead of the name too, but I wanted to keep it clear for this example
Let me know if you want the version that uses fewer automation runs, running a bit late and don’t have the time to write that one out right now sorry!
