How can use “processing” check box as a temporary lock in airtable automations to prevent duplicate rink allocations? I have a bowling booking system where bookings trigger an automation to randomly allocate rinks 2 - 8. When several bookings are processed close together, the same rink can be allocated to more than one booking. I already have an Available check box in my rink pool table. I cannot use scripting and dont want to redesign the system. What exact automation steps would processing act as a lock so each rink can only be claimed once?
Question
Processing
+32Could you talk more about your workflow? Are these bookings made via forms or something? Who’s ticking the ‘Processing’ checkbox?
If you could provide some screenshots of the relevant tables / automations that’d be helpful!
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Off the top of my head, it feels like you’d first need to solve for the fact that Airtable automations can run in parallel. And so if the automation is what’s picking the rink it’s going to be possible for two automation runs to grab the same rink I’m afraid
My usual workaround for this is to create a sort of task queue system that forces the automations to run sequentially, and this involves having a Tasks table and a helper table to determine which is the latest task
The idea is to link all the Task records to a single record in the helper table and create a lookup field in the helper table to display a unique ID (say, the record ID) of the latest Task record using conditional filters. You can then display that in the Tasks table and use that to identify the latest Task, does that make sense?
Assuming your bookings are coming through a form and creating new records, then that would be the Tasks table and you’d just need to create a helper table
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