​@mflo  if you need to create that delay, you can use Make.com and use the module sleep to delay each run a couple of seconds.

But in this case you would need to move the automation outside or Airtable. 

Another option would be using a “Run a scrip” sep to make it, but it will be a little bit more complex that simply run this using make.com.

Happy to help if needed.

Felipe @Aspirity.com 

Hey ​@mflo,

Not sure if this will solve your issue, but if you need to include a “delay” (eg. 5 seconds) in an Airtable automation you will want to have the following script: 

let start = Date.now();
let delay = 5000; // 5 seconds

while (Date.now() - start < delay) {
  // Busy wait - do nothing
}
output.set("message", "5 seconds passed");

Having said that.. How is the documint generation being triggered?

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hm, you may want to open a support ticket with Documint directly, seems like a problem most of their customers would face

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Sounds like your automation has a ‘Repeating Group’ that creates one record per name in that new table, and there’s a separate automation that triggers whenever a record gets created in that new table? 

The simplest way would be to use a Make scenario where you’d turn on ‘Sequential processing’ I think.  Free plan has 1k ops, so you should be fine for 500 or so Documint calls?  

You could try writing a script to handle this for you to keep it in Airtable but it gets complicated because of the 30 second automation limit; if you were doing 2 seconds of delay you’d only be able to handle 15 per Run a Script step so you’d need to handle that too

Probably won’t work but worth a shot: if you’re fine with it taking awhile, you could try using an autonumber, created time, and formula field to help with this?  Idea is to use DATEADD and add the the last digit of the autonumber value to your created time, and check if NOW() is past that, then get your automation to trigger off of that?  The reason I say it might not work is that NOW() updates in batches, and so more likely than not you’ll end up with multiple records suddenly meeting the criteria and running as a batch anyway.  It’d probably be less than what you’re doing now depending on how many names get linked to a single submission at a time though

Thanks so much for your suggestions. As it turns out it seems to have been a transient issue, since trying it again several times it seems to be working when several names are submitted at once the Documint request did not error out.