I am trying to figure out an issue where attachments in my Airtable records are being deleted - allegedly by me according to the record history - when I am doing nothing of the sort.
I am using Integromat to create an Airtable record from incoming emails - the script includes populating an Attachments field in Airtable with certain email attachments.
I then have a native Airtable automation that classifies these incoming email message records based on their content and updates a Message_type field
That all works just fine, however in many, but strangely not all cases, the attachment then mysteriously gets deleted…
Here’s the record history pane from one of these records (I’ve obscured the data fields)
The Activity history shows the initial creation of the record via API, including an attachment, from Integromat, then the classification step using my Airtable script - in this case is a ‘no match’. All this script does is set a value in a ‘Message type’ field based on sting matching against content in the email body
But then the Activity history it shows the attachment is deleted - by me! But I did not delete it!
How can if work out what is actually driving this unwanted deletion of the attachment?
Hi Justin, I think you actually helped me with the classifier Airtable automation I’m now using, so I guess this is now an example of no good deed going unpunished… Sorry about that, and thanks for all your help :grinning:
The relevant piece of my Integromat flow looks like this:
I’m taking file attachments from incoming emails, filtering for PDFs only, saving them to Gdrive, then adding them into an Attachments field in an Airtable record. I don’t actually need the files in Gdrive at all, but this was the only way I could figure out how to handle the scenario where there are multiple file attachments
Since its Gdrive, there is a stable URL where these documents do actually permanently live, and since this does work some of the time, I figure this cant be a permissions issue on the Gdrive…
A potentially relevant bit of info is that this behaviour seems to be inconsistent - the attachment deletion seems to happen a bit more than 50% of the time, but not every time.
Sorry for the delay. Here’s the relevant part of my scenario (the full thing is the mess I was remembering earlier; this part is actually pretty simple):
Even though the “Upload a File” module does provide a sharing URL for the uploaded file, it’s not persistent enough for Airtable’s taste.
I think that Google has been updating its Integromat modules, because I don’t recall seeing the “Get a Share Link” module when I ran my earliest tests last year. I could be wrong. However, when I built this test scenario a little over a month ago, I discovered it, tested it, and subsequently rejoiced. The link that it provides is sufficiently persistent, and the file doesn’t vanish from Airtable shortly after arriving like a trick-or-treater through a convenient trap door that’s triggered by the doorbell…wait, what was I talking about?
Here’s the setup for “Get a Share Link” if it helps.
In the Airtable module, the attachment field setup looks like this (I’m using my own custom filename created in Airtable, but you could probably use the native file from Google if you want):
@Richard_Foxworthy In this case, my gut says that the “Get a Share Link” module would need to go inside the aggregation structure. I haven’t used Integromat aggregators yet, but I’m guessing your current setup aggregates share URLs from the “Upload a File” step. Switch it to pull the share URLs from the “Get a Share Link” module instead.
