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DaringCapital
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hi, i'm a total novice and really struggling with an automation, any help greatly appreciated pls 🙂

My client hosts quarterly events, attendees register via airtable form. 

I am familiar with creating the form and the automated email reply. But thereafter the client would like to check the existing 'Contacts' tab to see if the attendee is an existing contact:

If so, do nothing

If not, create a new contact in the 'Contacts' tab.

I am stuck on the find records step, I'm not sure how to ask it to check the contacts table. When I look online it says to do find records, but I'm not sure of the conditions.

Thanks in advance for any help

Screenshot 2025-01-17 163153.jpg

2 Replies 2

Hey @DaringCapital!

This is tricky to achieve using Airtable Forms -but it does depend on your specific needs and database architecture (as well as how clean your want your database to be).

How I would structure this:

Contacts Table
Events Table
Registrations Table

Workflow upon form submission:
1. Check if Contact exists in Contact Table
- If contact does exist, update its personal information
- If contact does not exist, create Contact record
2. Create Registration record, which would link a specific Contact and a specific Event.

Doing this only with Airtable would require a somewhat dirty architecture. as Airtable does not allow you to push data to multiple tables out of one single submission (see my feature request here!). Therefore you would need to capture and store personal details at the Registration table first, and only then push them to the Contact table.

How I would go about it:

1. Use a different form provider (e.g. Fillout). Given its Airtable integration, and its Parent/Child form structure, it does allow you to create linked records from within the form (meaning that you can push info to multiple tables).
2. However, you will actually want to use Make.com as well, to do the "check if the contact exists to either update or create.." before pushing your data to Airtable

I'd be happy to show you around for both (i) quick and dirty; and (ii) more robust solutions.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 

Hmm, assuming your data's set up like this:

Screenshot 2025-01-26 at 11.54.39 AM.png

Screenshot 2025-01-26 at 11.54.23 AM.png

Then you'd get your automation to check whether it found any records in the 'Contacts' table with the same email value that was just submitted.  If it found one record, then link it together.  If it didn't find anything, create it and link it to the new Submission record.  If it found >1 record with that email, send you a notification so you can figure out what went wrong

Screenshot 2025-01-26 at 11.53.37 AM.png

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