Embedding formula fields only offers "length", rather than field values

[peter_jaques]

Hello! I’m working on an automation to send an email under certain conditions.

I have two tables: Courses and Students, and the automation triggers when I make a given change to an entry in Students. It then should find the Course with the given course code from the Students entry, and send an email to the Student with some looked-up info from the Course.

One example of something I want to embed is the Course’s schedule, which is a formula, returning text, in the Course table.

I can successfully find the record from Courses, but the problem is that, when I hit “+” and drill through:
Records (from Step 4: Find records)
→ Records
→ Field values
→ Schedule, hit “continue”

the only thing available to embed is “length”, not the actual field value. Some other fields I can successfully embed, including fields that are Linked to Another Table.

Maybe this has to do with the results of the Find being a list, but I’m guaranteed only to ever get one result (as the course codes are unique).

Anyway, how can I include the results of these formulae in my email?

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, the “Find Records” action doesn’t work in the way that most of us would expect it to work.

It only returns a list of record ID’s that you can then paste into a linked record field to link a group of records. That’s about it. (Maybe there’s something else that people are using it for, but that’s the only thing I’ve seen it used for so far.)

To do what you want to do, your best bet would probably be to structure your database in a different way, such as creating a many-to-many relationship — and then you can trigger your automations from the junction table instead of the students table.

Otherwise, if you want to keep your database structure the same, you would need to either:
(1) setup your automation in a different way,
(2) write your own custom JavaScript that does the searches for you, or
(3) use a low-code/no-code automation platform like Integromat which can do the searches for you.