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Can’t imagine this isn’t a bug, but I’m open to hearing explanations. I have a table built from a Salesforce report sync. One field is Account Name. If account name contains a comma, lots of other things break because Airtable doesn’t handle commas correctly in linked records (there’s a feature request open to address this). So I have a very simple automation that should fix things.

When a record enters a view I have 2 actions:

  1. Run a simple script to grab the account name, strip commas, write the new account name to a separate field in the table. This works fine.
  2. Send a Slack message that includes the new account name from that just-written field. This does NOT work. Account name is always empty in the Slack message.

If I test the automation by generating a preview of the Slack message, the account name is there correctly, without commas. It seems Airtable does not wait for action 1 (the script) to complete before running action 2. But that couldn’t be… right? 🤔

To test, I added a delay at the end of the script to keep it running for 1 second. 2 seconds. 3 seconds. Nothing works. The account name is always empty in the message. It kinda feels like even though the new account name appears to be written to the table, it’s not truly there yet. Like maybe I SEE it, but on the backend something still has to happen to commit the write operation.

Instead of writing the new account name to the table, I can try to use output.set() to store the new name, then reference that variable in the Slack message, but I’d rather figure out why this won’t work. Any thoughts?

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Hm, for the Slack message, I take it you’re using the data from the initial record like so?

If so, you’re actually re-using the data from the initial trigger of the field and not the updated version.  To use the updated version, you’d need to add a “Find record” and use its results instead

Consider:

  1. Automation triggers when ‘Status’ is set to ‘Todo’
  2. ‘Update record’ step to update ‘Status’ to ‘Sent to Slack’
  3. Slack message acton that sends the record’s ‘Status’ valus
    1. If our Slack action uses the data from step 1 (i.e. the trigger), then the status sent will be ‘Todo’
    2. If our Slack action uses the data from step 2 (i.e. the Update record step), then the status sent will be ‘Sent to Slack’.

 

Hi,

I struggled a lot with different ways like change comma to underscore, link, change again…
After that, I found better way - just create formula  to quote field content, like
Value One, Two, Three => “Value One, Two, Three”
When using non-quoted string with commas, system considers it as several values.
With quotes,  it gets as a single value.

 


 


In some cases you can use that, in other - not, depends on import procedure.
Hope it can help you.

p/s/  At first year I worked with Airtable, I was annoyed by such linking behavior. Now I’m using it as a good feature (I mean ability to multi-link by pasting a single string with comma-separated values)

 

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