Creating a set of tasks that are automatically assigned when added to an event

[Kelby_Ledford]

Hi!

We are using a calendar for scheduling in one of our bases and it’s to assign a trainer to trainings that we will be providing over the next few weeks. Is there a way to always have a set of tasks assigned automatically when someone is added to that calendar event?

Ideally the trainer would have a list of to do’s to start working on once they are assigned that event. Is there a best way to do this?

Thanks!

[WilliamPorter]

@Kelby_Ledford,

Welcome to the Airtable Community! I don’t have a great answer for you, sorry, but since nobody has given you that yet, I thought I’d at least throw in a thought.

As a general principle, nothing happens in Airtable automatically. Airtable doesn’t have a built-in macro or scripting feature. In general, if you need to create records inside Airtable, you create them by hand.

However, Airtable does support Zapier, and it might be possible to use the creation of new trainer record to trigger a “zap” or sequence of zaps that create the records you want. Alternatively, Airtable Pro accounts now support scripting with javascript. I’m not good enough with javascript myself to tell you how to use it to solve this problem but I am almost certain it would be possible.

Finally, there may be a way to do this without Zapier or javascript and without a great deal of manual work. I’m unable to tell you precisely what to do here because I don’t know the details of your problem, but here’s a suggestion for you to consider. If the tasks are always the same, then you might be able to do this with multiple tables and a couple of relationships (table links). You might for example start with a Tasks table and populate it with the tasks every new trainer assignment is supposed to be connected to. Define a link-to-record from Tasks to TrainerAssignments (uncheck “allow linking to multiple records” on the Tasks side). Click in the Tasks field TrainerAssignments (the link-to-record field) to create a new TrainerAssignment record. And at that point you, um, need to do some other things. Sorry. The idea is, your TrainerAssignment records will always be linked to the same list of tasks–but this list can be displayed in the TrainerAssignment record via a rollup field; and then your trainers can mark the tasks “done” when they’re done.

This might call for a many to many relationship (many tasks can be assigned to each trainer, and many trainers can be asked to perform each task). The table I called “TrainerAssignment” above is the “join” table in this many-to-many relationship. You can read about setting up a many-to-many relationship here:

Airtable - Support

A beginner's guide to many-to-many relationships

What sets Airtable apart from ordinary spreadsheet applications is its ability to link related concepts together. Knowing how to represent the relationships between different groups of objects can ...

Good luck.

William

[kuovonne]

You can automate the creation of tasks with either Scripting block or a third party integration. A script would require someone to press a “run” button, but could automate everything else. A third party integration would like Zapier could be fully automated, although it would require a delay of several minutes and is not quite as robust.

Currently a script would be free, although after after September it will require a Pro subscription. There are also several publicly released scripts that you can use or adapt even if you do not know JavaScript, including scripts for both of the options I describe below.

• If your tasks are a simple checklist, you can create checklists in the new Rich Text field type and use a script that sets up blank cells or sets default values.

• If the tasks are more complex than a simple checklist, you can create a script that creates linked records.