Find or create record in Airtable Automations

Josh_Cyk · ‎Sep 17, 2020

There doesn’t appear to be an action step in Airtable Automations that allows for finding records by a search criteria and creating the record if it doesn’t exist. This can be done with Zapier, but I would love to be able to accomplish automations requiring this to be done with Airtable Automations. Is there a workaround that would allow for this? Perhaps using a script?

kuovonne · ‎Sep 19, 2020

Automations is still quite new, so it doesn’t yet have features that come with Zapier.

You are right that the workaround is to use a script. However, because the script cannot produce output for chained actions, you would need to complete the remaining steps in the script as well. If you would like a future action that would be difficult to accomplish in the script (such as sending a message) you can move that final step into a different automation.

Stephane_Gervai · ‎Jun 06, 2021

Any news on that? It would be a pretty basic and useful feature.

kuovonne · ‎Jun 06, 2021

This is possible with a script. A script can find or create the record and output the record ID to be used in in future steps. (I don’t know if the output.set function existed back in September of 2020, but it does now.)

As of now (June 6, 2021) there is no “find or create” action in Airtable automations.

Photostetic_305 · ‎Sep 20, 2021

Hi, Can you help with this script ? I have a client table and for every new orders I want the script to check if the client exist (in the client table) and if he doesn’t, create a new client. Any template existing with that script ? Zapier can do it, but I am trying to avoid it.

kuovonne · ‎Sep 20, 2021

Welcome to the Airtable community!

If you are interested in my script writing services, the first step is to book an appointment to discuss your needs.