A junction table vs conditional automation?

[Betsie_Garcia]

Hello Airtable Community,
I need your help! I am creating a weekly email digest for an organization that I am a part of that helps students find internships in the entertainment industry. This is a new venture for us and I am happy to be a part of building the framework and structuring this program.

What I’ve done so far is begin to build a table that is organized by view by the following categories as I am doing this manually.

• Film
• TV / Broadcast
• Theater
• Digital Advertising
• Social Media (Youtube, TikTok etc)

Within each of these categories (views), there are pretty much the same jobs within each. For example:

• Administrative/ Office Assistant
• Production Assistant
• Videographer
• Photographer / Behind the Scenes
• Video Editor

This of course is not the exhaustive list however from these positions, I am trying to utilize the weekly digest automation to allow students who sign, to select their specific area of interest (categories like Film vs Theater) and then be able to be more specific and select their desired field or role (for example like Video Editor) only.

So my goal is if a student only wants to find opportunities in the theater to be an administrative assistant, when they sign up for the weekly digest, they only ever see those opportunities.

Would a junction table be my best bet or is this an automation issue? I want this to be as seamless as possible and as hands-off which is why I am doing weekly digest automation however, I need help.

Any assistance or advice would be welcome!

Thank you

• B

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hi Betsie, you could probably just do this with automations, yeah.

I assume there’s a table where each record represents a student, and contains the information about their area of interested and their desired field or role?

If so, the conditional automation you mentioned would work fine. You’d have to set up a formula field that would make the automation trigger once a week, and then you’d set up your conditionals like so:

After that, it’s just another action for actually sending the found records as an email and you’re sorted

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

If each student will have be interested in exactly one job type in exactly one industry, then Adam_C’s suggestion will work.

However, if a student is interested in multiple job types or multiple industries, this will not work.

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As for needing a junction table, if you have a table of job types and a table of industries, then your table of opportunities already is a junction table.

You could have yet another table that lists each combination once and then have the opportunities link to the combinations table. But creating the links will be a pain to maintain.

—-

There may be other creative ways to handle this, but I would do it with scripting.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

kuovonne:

If each student will have be interested in exactly one job type in exactly one industry, then Adam_C’s suggestion will work.

However, if a student is interested in multiple job types or multiple industries, this will not work.

Ah, you’re right! Hmm, what if we updated the automation to be like this instead?

This…seems like it works, but honestly I’m still somewhat confused as to how it’s working as well ha

Base link

[Betsie_Garcia]

Hello All,
Thank you so much for your suggestions. It seems like scripting may be a solution to my problem because as you mentioned @kuovonne and as you demonstrated @Adam_TheTimeSavingCo, inputting the infinite permutations of combinations would be a pain in my butt.