What is the ID of the record?

[Charlie_Livings]

Hi,

I have a field with 3 drop down statuses. One of them is ‘needs review’. I want to setup an automation so that when a date is met, the status of the relevant field is changed to ‘needs review’.

The question is, what is the ID of the record I want to update? When I choose the ‘review status’ field, the options I see are ID, name and color. Is it ID or name? I’m not trying to change the name of the field. I’m trying to update the status of the record.

[Kamille_Parks]

“ID, Name, Color” refer to the individual choices for the single select field. So if you have an option called “potato”, its name would be “potato”, its ID would be some random string, and its color will be dependent on how you’ve configured the field.

To update the correct record, go to the record ID box of your Update Record step and select the record ID from your trigger record.

[Charlie_Livings]

I’m confused. What I’m trying to do seems simple to me; maybe I just don’t understand the terminology correctly.

I have a field called Review Status (multi select). I have another field called Edit Due Date. When Edit Due Date = Today, I want the Review Status for the record to change to ‘Needs Review’ (one of the multi select options).

This is what I see on Airtable:

'Record ID

ID of the record to update. To update a record from a previous step, use the + menu to choose the step and its Record ID.’

Is the Record ID ‘Review Status > ID’ and then ‘Insert’?

And then the Field is ‘Review Status’ and then I type in the box ‘Needs Review’.

So I tried doing the above but on testing it says my inputs are invalid. My inputs: https://imgur.com/a/FQlVQAd

Is this the correct way to enter the name of an option from a multi select field? https://imgur.com/a/ggVrsna It is lowercase in the field.

[Daniela_Hecht · Accepted solution]

Hey Charlie, I struggled with the same issue when I started with automations, it’s a bit confusing, but I figured it out and it’s not hard at all.

First you have a trigger, right? in this case your trigger should be “when record matches conditions” and set as condition “when {Edit Due Date} - is - Today”

Then you have an action. You select “update record” and the same table of the trigger.
For Record ID you select “Record from step 1” > Continue > Record ID
With this you are telling airtable to make the update of this step to the same record that matched the conditions in the trigger.
Then, in the NEXT field of the automation action form you select the field (in that record) that you want to update, NOW you select {Review Status}
After selecting the field you can set the VALUE that you want to update the field to, in this case it is not a value from a previous step, so you can just type ‘Needs Review’ in the box, and you’re set.

Hope it helps

[Charlie_Livings]

@Daniela_Hecht You might be a genius. Hold on.

Yes, that worked! The key bit I was missing is that you insert the Record ID with the value from the trigger.

Thank you.