Preventing duplicates from entering a view

[Bill_Robinson]

I’m capturing leads from a webform in airtable
I can’t keep people from submitting information multiple times (the webform is a drawing for a prize).
How can I create an automation for the original names entering a new view - that will check on email address as a unique identifier, for any other record already in the view with that email address before copying from the grid view/original view to the new “deduped” view?

[ScottWorld]

There are many different ways of approaching this, but in your case, I would just have the automation do a search for the email address upon form submission.

If it finds more than one result, then have it mark the new record with a checkbox that represents duplicates.

Then, your “DeDuped” view would be filtered to only show you those records where the checkbox is unchecked.

[Bill_Robinson]

can you point me to a post on how to do this search and flag automation?

[Bill_Robinson]

the form is not an airtable form -it’s a webform connected to airtable via zapier

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

That would be even easier. Just have Zapier search for duplicates first, before adding the new record into Airtable. Then, you’ll only end up with unique records in Airtable. No additional views necessary.