Rollup-fields broken?

[Martin_Bernstor]

Hi guys!

I have trouble with the roll-up fields. Currently, almost nothing seems to work – even fields that worked before.

As an example, I’ve created a roll-up field to count the linked records (see attached).

Let me know if you need anything else!

Martin

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Martin_Bernstorff!

In order to troubleshoot this, you would need to show the “T Well Spent” field in your screenshots.

However, if you just want a count of the linked Log records, you can simply create a field of type “Count” (instead of “Rollup”), and point to your Log linked record field.

[Martin_Bernstor]

Hi Scott!

As far as I can tell from the documentation, the COUNTALL function counts all records, regardless of the values in the field. (Rollup field reference – Airtable Support)

I tried with other functions, same problem :slightly_smiling_face:

Martin

[ScottWorld]

Oh yeah, you’re right — the COUNTALL function should return the same thing as a Count field. I would try creating a Count field instead of a Rollup field and see what happens.

Also, I wonder if you have 2 linked record fields that are named what appears to be “Log”, but might be slightly different (for example, with a leading or trailing space).

[Martin_Bernstor]

Thanks Scott!

1. I don’t have other fields named “Log” or similar, just checked.
2. A count field works fine.

I tried the “COUNT” function in the roll-up field as well, same issue.

What I want to do is SUM() durations, but that didn’t work, so I investigated and found that I couldn’t get any rollup functions to work. That’s why I’m using COUNTALL – it should be the most fool-proof function.

Any other suggestions? :slightly_smiling_face:

Martin

[ScottWorld]

I would contact support@airtable.com about this, and post back here with what they say!

[Martin_Bernstor]

Turns out the values placeholder in COUNTALL(values) in the roll-up field was erroneously being interpreted as {Values} (a column I have in the sheet). A bug-report has been filed, and a temporary fix is renaming the column to something else :slightly_smiling_face:

[ScottWorld]

Wow, amazing. Thanks for posting back on this issue, @Martin_Bernstorff!

Can you clarify where your Values column was located, and what the exact name of that column was?

(It’s often terrifying to me how shoddy the underlying Airtable programming code is. There is no shortage of bugs like this in Airtable, but I guess that’s what we get with a product that was created by all millennials with no prior programming experience.)

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

ScottWorld:

Can you clarify where your Values column was located, and what the exact name of that column was?

Ahhh okay, I figured it out. The field “values” was in the same table as the rollup field.

It also looks like this bug requires the field named “values” to be created PRIOR TO creating the Rollup field. If you create it afterwards, the bug doesn’t kick in.

Thank you for sharing this bug with us!

Here’s how I am summarizing this bug for others reading this thread in the future:

You can’t name a field “Values” prior to creating any Rollup fields in that very same table, or else it will break your Rollup fields. The Rollup fields will think that they are referencing the field {Values} instead of the linked records that you’re trying to rollup.

And then, to really see this bug in action, delete your “Values” field, and watch all the Rollup fields get an error symbol in their column headers. When you customize those rollup fields, they will then be displaying the (now missing) Field ID instead of the word “Values”.

However, if you create your rollup fields PRIOR TO creating the field named Values, then everything works fine.

:man_facepalming:t2: :man_shrugging:t2: