Condition failing when using contains and the field is a linked record

[Erin_Alter]

Greetings.

i am having difficulty narrowing down the conditions for an automation.

I want to activate this condition in my automation only if the name of a specific linked record contains the word “Conversation”. I could not make it work using the the linked record name, so i tried creating a Lookup Field that would just reflect the value of the Record name that i wanted.

But it still does not work. Is there a way to accomplish this?

Thanks for any help you can give!

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @Erin_Alter - using a simpler example I’ve just tested that “contains” on a linked field value will work as a valid condition.

When you say that it does not work, do you mean that the action is not happening, i.e. email not being sent or similar? Is it just that there are no records meeting the conditions that you have set - record are getting filtered out by one of the other conditions? You could check this by setting the same conditions as a filter on a view.

[Erin_Alter]

Hmm. no. when i said that it does not work, i should have said it fails.

i tried your suggestion of checking the conditions by filtering to see if i could pull the record i was trying to get. and that was successful.

Here are all of the conditions i am trying to filter by. The first two are top level conditions of the automations, applied to all of the conditional groups below it. The last three are the ones i am trying to troubleshoot, specifically the final one- “TW Project Name (from Service Placement) Contains Conversation”

When i use these conditions to filter my view, it does pull the record that i expect it to pull. So that is good.

however, filtering by the same fields as a condition for an automation fails.

Any thoughts for what i could do to fix the error?

[Erin_Alter]

bump bumpity bump bump

[Erin_Alter · Accepted solution]

Apparently this is just a problem with Airtable. Using the “contains” feature to create a condition when the field is a linked field does not work.

i’ve chosen to work around this gap by creating another option in a different field that i can use conditional logic for. It is more clumsy, but it will suffice.

[Stephen_Turban]

Just to chime in here. I've found that the contains statement in the airtable automations does seem to have some buggy activity. For example, If I have the field "Summer Cohort 2023" and then the condition is Does not Contain "Summer" then this condition passes. Interestingly, the find function in airtable works, so it must be something to do with the automations set-up. 

[Stephen_Turban]

As I look at this, I think what is happening is that Airtable is representing this as a list not as a string, so the contains feature is saying [Summer Cohort 2023] = "Summer Cohort 2023" which is evaluating as false. 

That's not super intuitive so if that is true, might be useful to lay that out clearly or to address it by Airtable!