Automation doesn't pick up email address from linked table
Hi Everyone,
I really hope you can help me.
I have a table (Client Session Log) which creates a records every time the client has a session.
I’m creating an automation, where a forms is emailed out to the client after Session 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
It works up until the email part.
The email address for the client is in the Client Coaching table:
This is how I set up the email section:
1.
2.
3.
4.
I am getting the following error message:
I would really appreciate some advice here.
Thank you if you have taken time to look at this.
Kind regards,
Siobhan
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On the left, don’t choose “Base Structure”. Instead, you want to choose the email address from the trigger step, which is “when a record is created”.
If that still doesn’t work, then your automation is being triggered too quickly after the record is created (i.e. before the email address has a chance to populate in the new record), so you may want to switch your trigger to something else, like you checking a checkbox in that record. And then, make sure that you only check the checkbox after the email address is there.
(You can also try performing a “find records” action to find the brand new record that was just created… and then use the result of that “find records” action to grab the email address.)
And that’ll use the email value from the linked ‘People’ record
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As an aside, I’m kind of curious about your automation set up; I’m thinking we could set it up like this instead?
Hey @Siobhan B!
Just for further context, when you select “Base Structure” as the description mentions on your own screenshot, it is only returning “table and field IDs”. This means that when you are selecting “Client’s Email Address” you are actually retrieving the field id of field “Client’s Email Address” (fld….).
You can follow Adam’s step by step above go make it work!
I don’t currently have a Lookup field. Thanks for sharing the article link.
The tables are linked and the Client Coaching table is the main one. I‘m assuming from the article that the Lookup field is created in the main Client Coaching table.
Do I link the Lookup to the Client field rather than the Client Email Address?
This is how I’m interpreting the Lookup setup:
In regards to my interesting use of the session numbers, thanks for the suggestion to streamline the Conditions section. That makes a lot of sense! It was a newbie error! I have basic database knowledge but am trying to learn a lot as I go. I will try and combine them all into one Condition.
I am so grateful for everyone’s generosity in helping - @ScottWorld, @TheTimeSavingCo, @Mike_AutomaticN and @tahajiru
Thanks,
Siobhan
Hi @ScottWorld and @tahajiru,
Would this option rely on me having the Client’s email address in the Client Session Log table with the session data, rather than just being in the main table?
Thanks,
Siobhan
If you’re trying to email a customer after they submit a form, then you need to be able to identify the customer from their form submission.
The easiest way of doing this would be to simply ask the customer to provide their email address on the form.
You could also ask them for some other piece of identifying information, such as their customer ID #, which your automation could search for after the form is submitted, which would then figure out which customer to send the email to.
If you don’t want to make them type in their identifying information over and over again, then you’ll need to create a prefilled link for them that automatically fills in some piece of identifying information on the form — such as their customer ID # or their customer email address or their Airtable Record ID.
You can also hide this information on the form so they can’t see it.
This would require you giving each customer their own personalized unique link for each form, which would be very easy to do with formulas and automations. You can read more about prefilled links in Airtable’s support article here.
And, you can take this to the next level by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which offers hundreds of additional features that Airtable’s forms don’t offer. For example, you could give customers access to updating their own customer record, and they could create additional linked records for themselves (e.g. additional session forms) directly from their customer record.
re: The tables are linked and the Client Coaching table is the main one. I‘m assuming from the article that the Lookup field is created in the main Client Coaching table.
Do I link the Lookup to the Client field rather than the Client Email Address?
Hm, you’d want to put the lookup field into the table where each record represents a single session and has the session number, and so for me that was Client Session Log:
If that doesn’t help, could you provide some screenshots of your two tables?