Automation of schedule classes not showing up in order

[Brian_Bowersox]

I’m using an Airtable form to allow employees to register for trainings. I have created the form and it’s been working fine for me. I already have an automation that automatically sends them an e-mail with the class they signed up for, but I’m trying to modify that automation so that it sends them all of their “registered classes”. I have the automation working fine for this. I’m using a find records to look a condition for when someone’s name shows up. It sends an e-mail of the list of classes in a grid fine, but for some reason they aren’t organized by date like they are in the view. I feel like I’m missing one small detail. Any help would be greatly appreciated. How do I get these to show up in order of start date?

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re missing anything. When using Find Records, it seems to sort the results by the created time or something

We can use scripting to get the data sorted properly, but it wouldn’t be as pretty as the grid that Airtable automatically creates for you

(With enough effort, we could recreate how the grid looks, but that would be…a lot of work)

Hopefully someone else has a solution. Let me know if you want to explore the scripting side of things

[ScottWorld]

Yeah, it’s a major limitation of Airtable’s Automations.

You should definitely send an email to support@airtable.com to request the ability to sort records in automations. They don’t typically listen to customer requests, but they should still hear from us anyways since we’re the paying customers.

If you “find records by view”, it will return the records in the order that they are currently sorted on that view. But if you “find records by condition”, the sort order is completely unpredictable… it doesn’t even seem to be by creation date. Of course, “finding records by view” is not possible in the vast majority of real world scenarios, so almost everybody is out of luck when it comes to sorting.

Your only 2 options for solving this are writing a custom script or using an external low-code automation tool like Make.com.