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How to make a field's data be unique, must be unique to add record

  • February 4, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 550 views
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Hi,
I’m creating a table to track playlists and their curators. To stop me from adding duplicate records by mistake is it possible to set a requirement/validation on a field that all data must be unique.

To be more specific, I’m currently using Knack.com where I can set a field to ‘Must be unique’ and I am using this on the ‘Playlist Link’ url field. This means when I’m adding a new record it would tell me if I’ve already created it - thus avoiding duplicates.

I understand the Primary Field (the first column) is automatically set like this. But having the url as the primary field is not ideal as I’m assuming it will show up in the various views as the main field. Or I may need more than one field to be unique.

Is this possible in AirTable … my fingers are crossed. Many thanks for reading my post.

Best wishes
Nick

    1 reply

    ScottWorld
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    • ScottWorld
    • Genius
    • February 4, 2021

    Unfortunately, this is not possible with Airtable’s forms.

    However, if you’d like to prevent duplicate records from being entered into your Airtable system, your #1 best bet for this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it communicates directly with Airtable and it lets you prevent duplicate form submissions based on any text fields (or email fields) that you specify.

    Fillout offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to prevent duplicate form submissions, update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains or a list of email addresses stored in Airtable, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

    I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

     

    Alternatively, if your duplicates are ALREADY in Airtable, and you need to merge your duplicates together AFTER the duplicates have already appeared in Airtable, there are at least 4 ways of doing this:

    1. Using Airtable's DeDupe extension.
    1. Using this Airtable trick that I demonstrate on this Airtable podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc-0Jp6AvAs&list=PLqssva4liHRwHhQIpTXekG8WObEoyC2F1
    1. Using Make's Airtable automations & integrations. Make is an extremely powerful tool for Airtable that lets you create wildly complex automations, and it lets you integrate with almost 2,000 other apps as well. 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 ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
       
    2. Writing your own custom JavaScripts in Airtable.

    p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

     

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