Help

The Community will be temporarily unavailable starting on Friday February 28. We’ll be back as soon as we can! To learn more, check out our Announcements blog post.

Automation to Update a Linked/Lookup Field: Can we prevent a new record from being created?

Topic Labels: Automations
1185 1
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Lauren_Rodger
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I have 3 tables:

Table 1 = Customer Service
Table 2 = BackOrders & Dropshipments
Table 3 = On Hold Orders

Tables 2 and 3 are pulling data from an external system - any order flagged for one of these statuses in the external system is populated in this Table. The Primary field is the Order Number for these tables.

Table 1 is attempting to pull data from Tables 2 and 3 based on Order Number. The idea is that when a record is created in Table 1 with an Order Number, it will search Tables 2 and 3 to see if there is an existing record. Another automation pulls the Order Number “Name” to Lookup Fields for Tables 2 and 3 so the Order Number only needs to be entered once.

If a record exists, its name should be entered, if a record does not exist, it should remain blank. Part 1 works but we are facing the issue of a new record being created in Table 2 and 3 when the Order Number is not found.

I can’t seem to find a way to prevent the creation - we only want this field populated IF there is an existing record already existing in Table 2 or 3. Changing permissions on the tables to prevent creation through Automation results in an Automation error.

Is this possible within Automations or am I looking at a more custom solution? Hoping I’m missing something obvious here or overthinking the configuration needed for this.

1 Reply 1

Welcome to the community, @Lauren_Rodger!

Unfortunately, Automations don’t support conditional logic at this time.

You would either need to:

  1. Write a custom JavaScript to handle this logic for you (and there are JavaScript experts on this forum who might be able to help you with that).
    or
  2. You can use a no-code automation platform like Integromat, which doesn’t require any coding knowledge at all.

p.s. I am an expert Airtable consultant and an Integromat Partner. If you have a budget for your project and you need help with your Integromat automation, please feel free to contact me through my website at ScottWorld.com.