Duplicating multiple records within one table

[ashley_ashe]

What’s the best way to go about designing a table so that my team can duplicate multiple records at a time? For context, we are grant writers, and we want the tasks and subtasks for each grant to be the same. So I created a template that has 8 records. Right now, we have to make a copy of each record of the template and assign it to the correct grant. That of course leaves room for error. How can we duplicate the template Tasks at one time?

Thanks in advance.

[Julian_E_Post]

Hi Andrew, the original poster is Ashley, who is trying to figure out the solution for projects/tasks. That said, I’m very curious to see your automation - I copied the base, but I’m not sure the automation came through when you created a share link?

[ashley_ashe]

You just replied to me so he didn’t get your message :slightly_smiling_face: I’d like to see what he came up with!

[ashley_ashe]

Hi, just following up - did you get a response from him?

[Julian_E_Post]

No I didn’t. @Andrew_Palmer1, Ashley and I are curious about your automation, but I don’t believe you gave Airtable permission to share it as part of your base. Could you modify to include it?

[Andrew_Palmer1]

Hi,
I must have missed the previous messages – my apologies. It looks like Airtable makes it difficult to share the automatons publicly – you have to actually be a collaborator on the base. To show what I mean, I’ve included a screen recording of how it works.

I have the automation set to trigger whenever a record is created in the Projects table. Then the action taken is to “Create a record” in the Tasks table. I give that Tasks record a name (“1. Lay out grant”) and add in the link back to the record we created in Projects (“Record (Step 1: Trigger) | Record ID”). <-- this is the ID of the record from the first step that triggered this whole thing. Airtable handles all of that automatically, you just have to point it back to the right step.
You can see what I mean in the image below.

After this action, you’d set another “Create a record” action that makes the next task and associate it with the original project, and so on and so forth. Then, in the same automation, after you’ve created all those Task records, you can use more “Create a Record” actions to create SubTask records associated with the Tasks you created. It can get a little confusing to remember in which step you created the task, but after a little digging you can figure it out pretty easy.

Does that make sense?

[ashley_ashe]

Thanks for taking the time to send that to me. I figured out how to automate tasks being created, but I cannot get the Project to self-populate on the Tasks tab. I tried to set up my tables exactly like yours, and I followed your steps on the automations. Attaching screenshots.

[Andrew_Palmer1]

hmmm… I’m not sure what that could be. I’d recommend clearing all records out of those 3 tables and then running the test again. Maybe turn the automation off and back on. Everything looks right to me, but Airtable automations can be a little finicky to get set up. You could also try consulting the official automations documentation – I’ve found it very helpful in the past.

[ashley_ashe]

Thanks SO much for your help. You’re right - it is so finicky. I worked on it on Friday and finally figured it all out. Today it wouldn’t let me even start a new automation - all tests failed. I’ve logged out, logged back in, deleted and restarted. It’s just not cooperating today.

[ashley_ashe]

It refuses to let me pass this step! Thoughts?!

[Andrew_Palmer1]

I really don’t know why. Have you tried clicking the little “>” next to “Test Failed”? That should give you details on why it failed. The only thing I can think of is you may need 1 record in each table for it to actually run the test on. Maybe try just making a dummy record in each and running it again. Best of luck.