Nested IF statement - sometimes it's working, and ...

[cori_parrish1]

hi friends! we are an organization that provides online trainings. i have a base with registrations in one table and a unique attendance list in another table. the other table has a list of all the trainings.

so the registrations table is all the registrations we received for each training, so that we can see things like: 100 people registered for training X, 80 were approved to attend (either because they were members or they paid), and 70 actually attended. because people attend multiple trainings, this list contains different registrations for the same person.

the attendance table is a list of each person who ever attended a training with a related record field that contains all the trainings they attended, linked from the list. that way we can see things like: 300 people attended our trainings last year, person X attended 4 trainings, Y organization sent 4 people to trainings last year.

i have an automation set up that after a training happens & we record the attendance, it takes the person from the registrations table, finds them by email on the attendance table, adds them if they're not there, and adds the most recent training to their related records field.

this automation works SOME OF THE TIME. i have been triggering it record by record, to see if i can discern why, and i cannot. for the most recent training, it did 11 people just fine, some of whom already existed in the attendance table, and some didn't, and some of whom had existing related records in that field & some didn't. argh, what am i missing???

thank you friends, for any assistance!

[pressGO_design]

The first thing that springs to mind is that there are spaces before or after the email addresses that are messing up the automation. Are you trimming the email addresses on the registrations table?

[cori_parrish1]

thanks for that question! i hadn't checked that, but just checked & there are no spaces in the person that failed. but a good flag, i should add that to my process in case it is an issue in the future.

the automation actually said that it found the person just fine, the error was in adding the related record to the related record field. it says that it can't paste into a calculation field (the name of the related record (training) is a formula field based on the date and title of the event), but i don't understand that error because that sounds like it's trying to create a new training, which nothing in the automation tells it to try to do. it's just taking the name of the training from the list of trainings and adding it to the related record field.

[pressGO_design]

OK. So it can add the related record sometimes but not others. Ugh. I think I'd need to see more of your base in order to troubleshoot further. Maybe someone else can offer suggestions? Or you can DM me and we can figure out a time to talk.

[cori_parrish1 · Accepted solution]

i figured it out!! it was failing when the person had a training in their list that had commas in the title, so it was trying to make a new record of the info between commas. i fixed it by switching from using name of the related record to record ID. just sharing so it's a searchable answer for anyone else who ever has this issue.

thank you again pressGO_design for your help!