Help Needed: "Received invalid inputs." Error When Updating Records

[InnerMars]

Hello everyone,

I need help with automation in Airtable. I have two tables: "Needle Tasks - General" and "Needle Tasks - Antonov". The goal is to update records in the "Needle Tasks - General" table based on changes made in the "Needle Tasks - Antonov" table.

Here's how the automation is set up:

Trigger:

- When record updated
- Table: Needle Tasks - Antonov
- Fields: All fields

Actions:

1. Find Records:
- Table: Needle Tasks - General
- Conditions: Where "General - ID + Project" contains "Antonov Tasks ID + Project"
- It finds a record in the "Needle Tasks - General" table and returns Airtable record ID recvhvhDDXVsYTmCc

2. Update Record:

- Table: Needle Tasks - General
- Record ID: Use data from the previous action (Find Records)
- Fields: Data is taken from the trigger in Dynamic Mode

The problem arises when executing the second action (Update Record). I receive the error "Received invalid inputs."

Details of the error for the second action:

- Table: Needle Tasks - General
- Record ID: recvhvhDDXVsYTmCc

- Fields:
- Task name: checks 7
- Task type: Installation
- Employee: Arseny Kudryavtsev
- Status: In progress
- Details: test

Additional information:

- In the "Needle Tasks - Antonov" table, the field "Antonov Tasks ID + Project" is formed using the formula CONCATENATE({#}, " ", {Project}) and looks like «66 "Antonov"»
- In the "Needle Tasks - General" table, the field "General - ID + Project" is a Lookup field and retrieves data from the "Needle Tasks - Antonov" table.

The first action (Find Records) works correctly (i guess?) and finds the required record. Here is the log of the execution of action 1:

Found records:
- Airtable Records:
- Record 1:
- Airtable record ID: recvhvhDDXVsYTmCc
- Field values:
- (Autonumber): 9
- ID: 1
- ID: rectEMJyWKxKFDuMF
- Name: 66
- Project:
- ID: selamadJUVH4coWiL
- Name: "Antonov"
- Color: yellowBright
- General - ID + Project:
- LinkedRecordId: rectEMJyWKxKFDuMF
- ValuesByLinkedRecordId:
- rectEMJyWKxKFDuMF: 66 "Antonov"

My goal is to create several tables where tasks for different projects are placed, and I want to automatically combine the information from these tables into one large summary table. Since each record in the task tables is unique, in order to correctly find the corresponding records, I decided to use an approach with Autonumber as the primary column in the tables, in combination with "Project Name", so that in the overall summary table, there will never be situations with duplicate row numbers (tasks). I realize it might be possible to use the Autonumber from the summary table for this as well, but my current approach seems to find the necessary records correctly in action 1. I hope this explains my reasoning and that the community can provide some guidance.

If anyone has any ideas on what might be wrong or how to fix it, please let me know! It seems the Record ID is found correctly, but the data transfer for updating the record is somehow failing. Thanks in advance for your help!

[zazadi · Accepted solution]

I think your problem is that you are not linking the field with the record_id. Just select in the update-action the record_id-field from first step (trigger).

[Dan_Montoya]

Hello @InnerMars ,

It sounds like you might be over complicating your base.  If you are creating separate project tables for each project and trying to recombine the data in an all projects table you have made your build too complex.  

Rather than separate tables, have you considered one table with a field that has project name/type?    Then you would not need to build the automations to keep the tables in sync.  Ultimately, a separate table for each project is not scalable or supportable as your projects grow.

[InnerMars]

Thank you so much, zazadi!

Your suggestion was really helpful. After further investigation, I realized that the field "Сотрудник" (Employee) in both source table ("Needle Tasks - Antonov") and target table ("Needle Tasks - General") is a Linked Record to the "Needle Employees" table. The field supports linking to multiple records, and the primary cell in this table uses employee names.

To make the automation work, I did as you suggested and made a change:

I clicked on the token "Сотрудник" and selected Display: ID instead of Display: Name. This adjustment allowed the automation to correctly process the data.

Now the automation runs smoothly without any errors.

Thanks again for your guidance, it made a huge difference!