Processing

Could 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

The Processing checkbox won't reliably lock a rink here. Two bookings can both see it as available before either run updates the record, so the duplicate allocation can still happen

The useful question is whether we can make the allocation run one booking at a time without changing the rest of your booking flow. If you show the trigger and the step that picks the rink, I can tell you where that change needs to go

If you use Make’s Airtable automations for your automations instead of Airtable’s native automations, you can set it to run your automations sequentially instead of simultaneously.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the many different ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. You can even instantly trigger a Make automation by having a button or URL link trigger a custom webhook (with optional webhook response).

I 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. And in this video, I show how to use custom webhooks.

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

I don’t know your specific setup, like tables and how they are linked.

That said, I would probably make it impossible to link a rink to more than one booking at a time, so when a second one simultaneously tries to allocate it, it does not work.

That leaves the second booking without a rink, which I would then set up to feed back into the automation until it has a rink allocated.

So depending on what your setup is (I am going to assume you have a Rinks table, a Bookings table and a table to connect them like an Allocations table), that could mean using a view in the Bookings table as the trigger for the automation that allocates the rink.

You would need

• a Checkbox field like “Allocation in Progress” to mark it as automation running
• the linked record field from Rinks to Allocations (1:1 relationship)
• the linked record field from Bookings to Allocations (1:1 relationship)
• a lookup field in the Bookings table that shows the Rink that is linked to the linked Allocation.

The filters could be that the linked lookup field of the Rink is empty and a checkbox like “Allocation in Progress” is unchecked. 

So a new booking gets created which means the lookup is empty and the checkbox is unchecked and the automation kicks off. It updates the booking record by checking the “Allocation in Progress” checkbox which means the records disappears from the view that triggered the automation. Then it finds an available rink, creates a record in Allocations (if it is not linked to one yet) and links the rink and the booking to the allocation. At the end it unchecks the checkbox again. 

Now, if it only runs with one booking at a time, that booking now has a linked Allocation as well as a rink in the lookup and won’t show up in the view anymore to trigger the automation even though the checkbox is unchecked again.

However, if two bookings ran at the same time they would have tried grabbing the same rink, but due to the 1:1 relationship only one got actually linked to it. This leaves one booking with the checkbox unchecked at the end as well as the lookup field of the rink empty which means it appears again in the view to trigger the automation. This way each rink only gets assigned once with every booking getting what it needs.

Of course this contains a lot of assumptions about your setup, however I imagine no matter the setup this is possible to achieve in some shape or form. 

​@Jamie2601 

Also, you can use Airtable’s native forms and linked record fields to prevent 2 people from simultaneously grabbing the same rink. I demonstrate this process on this Airtable podcast episode.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the world’s best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Hey ​@Jamie2601, I hope you’ve been able to solve this issue.

If not, you can use the Processing checkbox as a temporary lock, but the order of the automation is important.

I’d structure it like this:

1. Find a rink where Available = checked AND Processing = unchecked

2. Immediately update that rink to Processing = checked

3. Assign that rink to the booking

4. Update the rink to Available = unchecked

5. Finally clear Processing

One thing to watch: Airtable automations aren’t truly transactional, so if two runs hit the same rink at exactly the same time, a checkbox alone may not guarantee a lock.

I can show you the safest way to configure this using your existing tables and automations without scripting or rebuilding the system.