How to stop creating new records automatically in linked table

Welcome to the community, Cheng! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: This feature can’t currently be disabled. It’s always going to create a new record in the linked table if the item you enter doesn’t already exist.

Can you describe more about your use case where you wouldn’t want that behavior to happen? Maybe there’s another way to structure your base to achieve what you want.

Thanks for your response Justin.

I need to copy user names from a Google drive spreadsheet. And some names may be slightly different from the one in the linked table. I would prefer airtable leaving wrong names as blank rather than creating a new record in the linked table. Is there any solution?

You can import to a different column, edit the usernames if needed then copy the whole column to the link column after processing.

Regards,

Alex

incredibly annoying! Please make this a feature, I’m editing a table for 1 hour now and I don’t actually know how many accidently created rows I had to delete in that time. PLEASE consider this feature request, @Justin_Barrett - or if that changed (I couldn’t find anything) please tell me how to do this. that would be a very simple checkbox which would smoothen my editing experience greatly.

Welcome to the community, @Axel_Bock! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: I’m just a fellow user like yourself. My badge & label just indicate that I talk a lot, and sometimes it’s helpful. :winking_face: While there is a feature requests category that Airtable staffers peruse on occasion, the most reliable way to get your request in front of Airtable devs is to contact Airtable support directly.

Make the primary field of the linked table a formula. Airtable will not be able to create a new linked record automatically when the primary field is a calculated value.

Thanks I was trying the reverse of this post - to allow creating linked records to happen as they were not for me - I’d created formula ‘1st column’ items and I couldn’t new records and was wondering why - many thanks

Any idea why I am getting duplicate records when I am linking from one table to another. The record exists, but AirTable is creating a record like it does not. Am I doing something wrong?

Hi,
Check extra spaces in field value.
If not, try to copy-paste both values into some record text fields and compare by formula (create new temporary table for that, if needed) . Sometimes it display value in a strange way, where & char present in text, containing line breaks.

Anyway, it’s a very useful feature, which can be used for grouping, find and mark duplicates, bulk dedupe or compare two arrays of values.
Another way to stop creating new records, besides calculated primary field, usable for temporary use before copy-pasting into link field - to set table permissions ‘Who can create records’ to ‘nobody’

Welcome to the community, @Colleen_Scollans! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Did the tips from @Alexey_Gusev help? If not, could you please share more specific details about your base setup and the steps that you’re taking that lead to the issue?

Thanks for the tip @kuovonne ! You always have the angle 🙂

Hi @Justin_Barrett & @kuovonne not sure if you might have any idea as to how to fix this.

I have a base with multiple linked tables within, one of these tables has compiled info that I am syncing to another base.

Since the vendor name is synced it is typed exactly the same across all tables and bases. I have an automation running to also link two tables together on the second base. However, even though the name is EXACTLY the same it doesn't find it and ends up creating a new row which messes up the whole flow.

I tried using record ID but since I sometimes have rows linked to multiple vendors, hence multiple record IDs I can't use it to run the automation. Is there anyway to fix this? I'd highly appreciate any insights.

You should be able to use record IDs when linking records. However, when working with synced tables, there are two sets of record IDs, the original record IDs in the source table, and the new record ID in the synced table. You cannot directly use the original record ID to link to the synced record.

As for why you are getting a duplicate record when linking the two tables in your automation, it is hard to diagnose the issue without seeing the setup of the automation and the actual data. There can be issues if primary field values are not 100% unique. There can be issues if primary field values have commas, quotes, or other special characters in them. There can be issue with how you are finding the records.

Another option that you can try is to change the field type of the synced link field from a text field back to a linked record field type.