Help

The Community will be temporarily unavailable starting on Friday February 28. We’ll be back as soon as we can! To learn more, check out our Announcements blog post.

Many records on "Create Record" Action from "When a Record is Updated" Trigger

Topic Labels: Automations
Solved
Jump to Solution
1252 1
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Adriano_Gomes_C
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hi, I think it´s is a basic issue but I´ll be grateful for any help.

When using the “When a Record is Updated” trigger for create a new record, several records are been created when a start to type the changes

Capturar

In this exemple above 4 records were created but I need just 1 new records with all changes made.

How can I solve that?

Thanks in advance!

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Yeah, unfortunately, this is one of the biggest problems & limitations with Airtable’s handling of records. It can certainly be frustrating.

Unlike other database systems, Airtable has no concept of when a user is “finished editing a field” or when a user is “finished editing a record”.

Airtable never waits for the user to finish editing a field (or finish editing a record) before it starts taking immediate actions on that field or record.

So Airtable believes that a record is continually “updated” with every keystroke that you type on your keyboard. (There is a slight delay of a few seconds, which is why you only see the unexpected behavior after every few keystrokes.)

So, your 2 best options would be to:

  1. Use a checkbox field to trigger your automation.
  2. Use a single-select field to trigger your automation.

Since you can only take a single action in a checkbox field or a single-select field, there won’t be any premature interference from Airtable.

Note that you can use these 2 options with either the “when a record is updated” trigger or the “when a record matches conditions” trigger. If you choose the “when a record is updated” trigger, be sure to have it monitor only the checkbox field or the single-select field — instead of monitoring the entire record.

See Solution in Thread

1 Reply 1
ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Yeah, unfortunately, this is one of the biggest problems & limitations with Airtable’s handling of records. It can certainly be frustrating.

Unlike other database systems, Airtable has no concept of when a user is “finished editing a field” or when a user is “finished editing a record”.

Airtable never waits for the user to finish editing a field (or finish editing a record) before it starts taking immediate actions on that field or record.

So Airtable believes that a record is continually “updated” with every keystroke that you type on your keyboard. (There is a slight delay of a few seconds, which is why you only see the unexpected behavior after every few keystrokes.)

So, your 2 best options would be to:

  1. Use a checkbox field to trigger your automation.
  2. Use a single-select field to trigger your automation.

Since you can only take a single action in a checkbox field or a single-select field, there won’t be any premature interference from Airtable.

Note that you can use these 2 options with either the “when a record is updated” trigger or the “when a record matches conditions” trigger. If you choose the “when a record is updated” trigger, be sure to have it monitor only the checkbox field or the single-select field — instead of monitoring the entire record.