Check if a record exists and if not, make one

[Ste89V]

I am trying to use AirTable as part of a node.js app to lookup users. Here is how it should work:

• The table has multiple columns, including one for ID.
• The API looks up the user ID by listing all and filtering by ID.
• If there is no record found for the user ID, it will create a new record for it.

I tried to attempt this using the code below, and it works fine when a user is found, but when it doesn’t, it outputs a 422 error with the status text “Unprocessable Entity”. I would really appreciate if someone could show me how to do this, or show me what I did wrong in my code. (The code is in Node.js and I used request and axios because I was copying existing code that was in Node.js request and I only know how to use Axios)

request({
        headers: {'Authorization': 'Bearer <TOKEN>'},
        url: `https://api.airtable.com/v0/<APPID>/Users?maxRecords=1&filterByFormula=${encodeURI(`{ID}=${<ID OF USER>}`)}`,
        json: true
      },function (error, response, body) {
        if(!body.records[0]) {
          console.log("NOT FOUND")
          axios({
            method: 'post',
            url: `https://api.airtable.com/v0/<APPID>/Users`,
            headers: {'Authorization': 'Bearer <TOKEN>'},
            data: {
              "fields": {
                "<field name redacted>": <number>,
                "<field name redacted>": <text>,
                "<field name redacted>": <number>,
                "<field name redacted>": <number>,
                "<field name redacted>": <number>,
                "<field name redacted>": <number>,
                "<field name redacted>": <number>
              }
            }
          })
          .then(function (response) {
            console.log(response);
          })
          .catch(function (error) {
            console.log(error);
          });

        } else {
          console.log("FOUND")
        }
      })

[Giovanni_Briggs]

422 errors generally mean either the request was formatted incorrectly or the datatypes you are trying to insert into the base don’t map to your schema.

The only thing I can see that potentially indicates the API might be rejecting the request format is you are missing the "Content-Type": "application/json" header. I’m not sure if Axios adds that header in for you, but doesn’t hurt to be explicit.

If that change doesn’t fix the issue, then I would recommend confirming that all of the fields you are trying to pass numbers to are Number field types in Airtable.

[kuovonne]

Does your code log “NOT FOUND” to the console when there is no record? If not, the issue may be with your if condition.

Ste89V:

if(!body.records[0]) {

In this line you are trying to read the first item in the records array. If a record is found, this condition would be false and code execution continues as you expect. However, if a record is not found (or there is some other problem), testing this conditions involves trying to access a non-existent first item in the array, which would cause an error.

When testing to see if a record exists, I prefer to test for the positive case. I first test to make sure that there is a records array, then I test to make sure that there is at least one record in that array.

if(body.records && body.records.length >= 1) {
  console.log("FOUND")
} else {
  // insert code to create the record
}

[Ste89V]

Thank you for your reply.
The code logs “NOT FOUND” whenever there isn’t a record, so I don’t think that is the problem. I should have clarified that. My bad.

Thanks again for your reply.

[Ste89V]

I tried adding the “Content-Type” header, and it didn’t change anything. I also double-checked the content types/whether it is a number or not.

If you were to do this, would you have done it in the same method I had? When I tried to use the Airtable.js package, there was an issue as well. Something about the offset.