+11Be careful updating field types!
I have a few automations that watch a field for updates to set a field-last-updated timestamp. I discovered that if you change the field type of a watched field from multi-user to single-user, if there is data in the field, it will consider the field “updated” and trigger the automation.
This is not documented anywhere that I could find! And it messed up my timestamps 😑
+22Interesting! I suppose I would kind of expect this, as single selects and multi-selects are handled differently. This sparked me to play around with this a little bit… Going from Single Select to Single Line Text also shows as an edit, but changing from Single Line Text to Long Text doesn’t unless you add RTF then it is an edit.
+35Yeah, Airtable is the only database app that I have ever encountered that treats a BASE SCHEMA MODIFICATION as a FIELD DATA MODIFICATION. (Yet, as
This is a real problem because it can be so disastrous.
The best we can do is report this problem to support@airtable.com, and suggest for Airtable to change this behavior by filling out the product feedback form at this link.
- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant
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