How can I get only updated field in the Automation? (Using "When a record is updated" trigger)

[hik_kaz]

Hi Airtable Community.

Now, I use "When a record is updated" trigger in my automation and I want to use only the data of updated field for sending notification to my team member.

Concretely, my table has 3 fields which are "Assignee_1", "Assignee_2" and "Assignee_3", and when someone update one of these 3 fields, I want to send the notification to only the member written in the updated field.

However, I don't know how do I get only updated field data.

If you have any good solution, please let me know. 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

The best way would be to create one automation per Assignee field you have I think.  If you're hitting the automation limit, you could try creating one "Last Modified Time" field per "Assignee" field and using a formula field to determine which field got updated, but this wouldn't work correctly if multiple Assignee fields are updated in quick succession I'm afraid

[Alexey_Gusev · Accepted solution]

Hi,
is it User field type? Or it's just an address in text format (or email)?

In short, you can add formula field like "Last entry":

IF(LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1,assign2,assign3)=LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1),assign1) &
IF(LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1,assign2,assign3)=LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign2),assign2) &
IF(LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1,assign2,assign3)=LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign3),assign3)

[hik_kaz]

Thank you for your reply! I use "User" field type.

I added your formula and I can get "User" field's displayed name. When I want to get user email, how should I change your formula?

[Alexey_Gusev]

I don't think it's possible to retrieve by formula
But you can do the trick with automation.
Change formula to output number of Assignee (1...3)

IF(assign1,IF(LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1,assign2,assign3)=LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1),1)) &
IF(assign2,IF(LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1,assign2,assign3)=LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign2),2)) &
IF(assign3,IF(LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign1,assign2,assign3)=LAST_MODIFIED_TIME(assign3),3))

additional IF added to avoid output when modification is delete value
I guess you should add conditional logic, to execute further steps only when number is not empty.

then you add script step, using all three emails as input data, select one according to number and output it as 'email_last'

you can use it then in further steps.

(Note: in script, I had to add "num" at the array beginning as in JS arrays are zero-based, [0,1,2,3].
  if you don't have an idea what it means, just ignore 🙂  )

That's the case, where Idea by @kuovonne might bring an easier solution. If you had a possibility to format first formula as User, you could use it in further steps with all data including email address

[hik_kaz]

Thank you for your suggestion. I'll try it the way you suggested. 😊