How Can I Trigger an Action After a Loop Step Finishes in an Automation?

​@mikkielias 

Unfortunately, this is one of the Top 5 major limitations of Airtable’s automations — Airtable doesn’t let us add any actions after a repeating group or a conditional action.

Please be sure to submit this as a feature request on the product feedback form.

Sometimes these sorts of limitations can be worked around by breaking up an automation into multiple different automations, but that won’t work in your situation.

In your situation, my #1 best recommendation for solving this would be to outsource your more “advanced” automations like this one to Make’s automations & integrations.

Make always performs repeating loops by default, so you don’t need to setup repeating loops in Make.

However, at first it might seem like Make is giving you the OPPOSITE problem of Airtable, because Make always performs ALL subsequent actions for EACH RECORD in your repeating loop.

So, to make Make only progress onto your final action after the final record is finished being processed, you can use Make’s filters to only progress onwards if the “current bundle number” equals the “total bundle count”.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread, including a very helpful Loom video that I created.

Also, here is one of the ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

My workaround for this involves a new table where each record is a single automation run so that you can track the items in the repeating group and whether it’s complete and an automation that triggers off that table!

I’ve set up an example here for you to check out

Here’s our tasks table:

And here’s the rollup table:

The automation triggers when we tick the ‘Run automation’ checkbox and it will:

1. Find all the records in Table 1
2. Create a new record in the Rollup helper table and link all the found records to it
3. Loop through them and tick the ‘Loop Complete’ record

In ‘Rollup’, you can see that there are two count fields, one to display the total number of linked records, and another to display the total number of linked records via a conditional:

We then have a formula field that’ll compare the two against each other, and once they match it’ll output ‘Complete’, which in turn will trigger another automation, and here’s a gif of it working: