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Parent / Child Update Automation

  • July 31, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 51 views
A
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Y'all.  I'm losing my mind over here.  I've done other automations in the past, but I've spent 2+ hours on something simple, and still can't make it work!  I'm trying to outline a sequence of lessons for a course.  Each lesson has a Prerequisites column and a Follow-Ups column.  I simple want to create an automation that will do the following:

  • When a record is updated in the follow-ups field,
  • Update the records that are referenced as Follow-Ups (children) to reflect that the original record is a Prerequisite (Parent)

Why is this so hard???

3 replies

Alexey_Gusev
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Hi,
such actions (multiple update) seems like not so hard now with a new feature 'repeated actions'. But if I understand correctly, Follow ups is a linked field. So , if you change it, links will be changed in the table containing children, without automation.

 
A
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  • Angie_Belle
  • Author
  • Known Participant
  • July 31, 2023

Hi,
such actions (multiple update) seems like not so hard now with a new feature 'repeated actions'. But if I understand correctly, Follow ups is a linked field. So , if you change it, links will be changed in the table containing children, without automation.

 

Thanks for the quick feedback, Alexey!  I did just stumble onto the repeated actions configuration, and it worked!  Now my only trouble is how to append, rather than OVERWRITE the info that was already in the field. Any ideas?

Alexey_Gusev
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Thanks for the quick feedback, Alexey!  I did just stumble onto the repeated actions configuration, and it worked!  Now my only trouble is how to append, rather than OVERWRITE the info that was already in the field. Any ideas?


Yes, just put current value there, and then new value after it. This can be a problem for some field types, as you should divide them by comma, but if any value absent, Airtable might throw error because of trailing comma.
Problem can be solved by conditional action (if cell is empty - update, if not - append). But you cannot set repeated and conditional. 
I hope you are not follow "pessimistic scenario", and your automatic will work.

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