I previously posted about this issue here:
I made updates to the Automation per
Any suggestions as to what’s triggering the error and how to fix would be appreciated!
Solved
Getting intermittent "Automation Failed" notices but actions have been completed - Reprise
+8Best answer by DisraeliGears01
Oh yeah, one of your main issues is that you’re inserting the “List of Found Records” into the RecID field instead of a RecID. The list of found records is everything in the record formatted (it’s more for sticking in email bodies and stuff). For the RecID field there, scroll down to the bottom and select “Make a New List of Airtable Record IDs”. As long as it always delivers only 1, that should work fine. Here’s a screenshot of the mockup I made of your automation…
EDIT- Oh and for future reference, your end time should be fine, that’s just the machine formatted versioning, before it gets formatted back into your preferred format.
+22Hmm, as I responded in the original thread, my suspicion on the failure condition for this is an issue with delivering multiple recIDs to an update action that isn’t in a repeating group. Basically if your Find action detailed in Step 1 ever returns more than 1 record, when you feed it into the update action in Step 2 it should give you “Invalid Inputs”. Try wrapping the update action inside a Repeating Group (so nice that we can use repeaters inside conditionals now) and see if that fixes the problem?
If you want to try to delay the run to see if that’s the problem, you have to use a script action for that. Something like
function delay(seconds) {
const startTime = Date.now()
while (Date.now() - startTime < seconds * 1000)
continue
}
delay(5)Credit to
+8I feel like the issue shouldn’t be multiple recIDs. (Though I’m not disputing that this might be the problem anyway, I’m just looking to understand.)
The initial Time Tracking record is created with a Start Time upon form completion. So we only have 1 linked record with no End Time - that’s all the lookup function should find. It first adds an End Time and then it creates a new linked record. I don’t see how it would return multiple records for that. I’m concerned that if I wrap it in a Repeating Group that it might override the previous End Time stamps.
As for the delay, I don’t know where that script would be utilized. As a step in the automation?
+22Yep, you’d add it as a “Run Script” action in the automation (presumably between the Update and Create actions). I’m trying to recreate your base and automations to see what’s up…
Also, can you screenshot the actual error in the automation pane history? While AT can be frustratingly opaque in the details of how exactly something fails, it’ll usually at least ID the step that failed.
+8
Here’s a screenshot of the error. Is the issue just that the End Time field is formatted differently than the full time stamp?
+8I expanded the Record ID and got this. ???
+22Oh yeah, one of your main issues is that you’re inserting the “List of Found Records” into the RecID field instead of a RecID. The list of found records is everything in the record formatted (it’s more for sticking in email bodies and stuff). For the RecID field there, scroll down to the bottom and select “Make a New List of Airtable Record IDs”. As long as it always delivers only 1, that should work fine. Here’s a screenshot of the mockup I made of your automation…
EDIT- Oh and for future reference, your end time should be fine, that’s just the machine formatted versioning, before it gets formatted back into your preferred format.
+8
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