Carrying Values Forward in a Log Using Airtable Automations (Free Tier)

Why don’t you use “Repeating Logic” block in automation after “Find Record” with limit set to 1 record? This will help you loop over every record found in the list and do whatever you want to do. But since you are setting conditions and limit such that you are expecting exactly 1 record from Find Records, your loop win run only once.

I agree with Anmol. In addition to that, I suggest using a self-link instead of populating values. So, your automation would just find the previous record and link to it. Then use lookup fields instead of inserting values from the previous record. That way, if you ever make a mistake in one record, you don’t have to edit other records to fix it.

A different way you could do this is to use “Deep Link” and an AI prompt to auto-populate the link with the previous record. For example, if you have an autoincrement number field, you could add a formula field to get the previous number (n-1) and tell Deep Link to find the record with that number. But, this would use AI credits.

-Natalka

​@CRMichalk 

If you’re trying to create your new record based on the existing record that you’re looking at, you don’t even need to use a “Find Records” step. You can just pull the values directly from the record that triggered the automation.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

This is quite a challenge to do on the free tier, but there are some options that can help you with this challenge.

One potential solution would be to create a dedicated single row in a separate table, something like “Config” or “Defaults that holds the “current defaults” that you will carry forward.  You can then create an automation that triggers when a new log record is created.  This will read from the fixed row, and then copy the values into a new log record, finally it will update the config row for the next run.

There is no need for sorting or “Find Records” that is needed and I would be happy to walk through the automation steps with you if you prefer.

Thank you all for the suggestions — this has been really helpful.

One additional wrinkle I’m dealing with is that the “previous record” I need isn’t always the most recent record in the table. It depends on what the record is for. For example, if I’m logging multiple vehicles, a new record for Vehicle A needs to carry forward values from the last Vehicle A record, not Vehicle B if that was logged most recently.

That’s the part I’m still trying to solve cleanly on the free tier — reliably carrying values forward per asset, without pulling from the wrong record.

Appreciate all the insights. 

This would be so much easier with scripting. Try this variation on Anthony’s suggestion:

Create another table with one row per asset (=vehicle, or whatever other things your table logs). Let’s call it CurrLogRecs

For each asset, CurrLogRecs has a link to the current record in your Log table.

Then create a trigger that does this: When you add a record for Vehicle A to the Log table, the trigger goes and does a Find Records in CurrLogRecs for Vehicle A. Then it updates your new Log record with the values from the old Log record linkedd in CurrLogRecs. Finally, as a last step, it updates CurrLogRecs with your new record ID.

Hope that helps. Update if you have any q’s or get stuck.

Natalka

This can get a little trickier.  Since you need a “per asset” history you need to be able to track the “last known state per asset”.

A clean way to workaround this on the free tier is to create a new “Config/Defaults” table into a “per-asset state table”
-Create an additional table called something like “Vehicle State”

-Have each record represents one vehicle (Vehicle A, Vehicle B, etc.)

-Store the “last known values” that you want to carry forward as fields on the record

Then

When the new log is created for Vehicle A you can use Find Record in the Vehicle State table and filter it by Vehicle A.  This is returning a list but since it is one record per vehicle it will simply return one match.  Then copy these values in the new log record, then update that same Vehicle State record with the new value.