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I’m trying to create a base for researching and resolving potential duplicates in another system. This system produces reports on a monthly basis that I’m trying to use as my starting point, ideally without any data cleanup of that file.

 

So far I have 3 Tables:

  • Imports
  • Individual Records
  • Group Records

My imports file/table has one row per individual record. Each individual record has a field called duplicate group ID. When two individual records have been identified as possible duplicates, they have the same duplicate group ID.

 

I was trying to do something like:

  • when a record in the imports table meets conditions
    • linked record field “Group Records” is empty
    • Another condition that checks for another automation to run first that corrects a field in the import file.
  • find records that have the same duplicate group ID
  • create one group record 
  • create one individual record for each record found that have the same duplicate group id

The problem I’m running into is that the automation is triggered for each individual record, so everything gets created twice. 

 

Does anyone know a way around this?

Hmm, if the end goal is just to see which records have duplicates, what if you tried this:

re: The problem I’m running into is that the automation is triggered for each individual record, so everything gets created twice. 

Hm, instead of using a ‘Create record’ action to create it, try updating the original record by pasting a unique value into the linked field to the Individual Records table

When we paste values into linked fields Airtable tries to find a record in that table with the same value, and if it exists it links it together, and if not it’ll create a new record.  By pasting it in you’ll end up with one Individual Record linked to multiple records in Imports instead, does that make sense?

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