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Update field in one secondary table with info from another secondary table

Topic Labels: Automations
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rrusmin
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hello helpful community,

I have a primary table of People with PersonID as the key. I have 2 secondary tables, Notes and Assignments, where PersonID is a linked field. A user reads the Note, creates an Assignment, then marks the Note complete. I'm trying to create an automation where:

  1. Once a Note is marked complete,
  2. Find the Assignment with the corresponding Person, and 
  3. Copy the content from a field in Notes to a field in Assignments.

All goes well, I think, until the 3rd step. 

Here is Step 2, it yields the results I expect.

rrusmin_0-1739405656690.png

Here is Step 3 where I get the "Invalid input" error message. How do I select the RecordID of the row we're iterating through in the Assignments table? 

rrusmin_1-1739405680062.png

I'm not sure what to select here:

rrusmin_2-1739405714932.png

Added complication: Some people have 2 Assignments, and I'd like to copy the Notes field to both Assignments. 
Any help or guidance would be appreciated, thanks!

1 Reply 1
Mike_AutomaticN
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

Hey @rrusmin!

If you'd like to get your automation to do exactly what you described (see steps below), you will want to implement a couple of changes.

  1. Once a Note is marked complete,
  2. Find the Assignment with the corresponding Person, and 
  3. Copy the content from a field in Notes to a field in Assignments.

To achieve step 1 above, you'll first want to change your trigger for the automation to run "When a record matches conditions" rather than on a scheduled basis. Such conditions should be when a record in the Notes table gets marked as complete.

Also, in order to achieve steps 2 and 3 it would not be enough to have the Assignment linked to the person, but you should have it linked to the Notes. In such way you could set a condition on you find assignment block where Notes field in Assignments table is exactly record record id from the record that triggered the automation.

Given that multiple assignments could be linked to the same Note, you should also now have a Repeating group which will use as input the list of record ids found by the Find Record block.

For last, you'll have an update record action block which will use the record ID of the Current Item (and not of the Find Records block as you are showing on your image).

The reason why you a receiving such error is because you are providing an array (list) to the recordid field of the Update Record action block as many records were found on your Find Records action block. If you take a close look to the screenshot below that is what I mean by selecting record id from Current Item and not from find records.

Mike_AutomaticN_0-1739448008186.png

Please let me know if this works for you, or if it makes kind of sense 🙂
Regardless of the above, I do believe that the workflow could be actually improved in different ways. If interested in having that discussion, feel free to schedule a call using this link!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation