Creating duplicate records

[Tony_Campbell]

Hi all, I am creating a transportation dispatching system. One of the things I’m having trouble with is creating duplicate records. For example, I take person A to the grocery store on Monday and Thursday every week at 0900. I can manually duplicate the record to reflect this, but it would be far less time consuming if I could duplicate the original record indefinitely or for a specified end time. How could this be accomplished? --Thanks!

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

There are many ways of accomplishing this task. If you share what you have tried so far and what your script writing skills are like, you may get more specific advice.

You can write a script to create duplicate records when you click a button, or you could have an automation to create new records on a schedule. There are also ways of using the user interface to create large numbers of identical records quickly by creating blank records and then using the drag handles to copy down values.

You may also want to clarify if you want exact duplicates where all of the values are the same, or almost duplicates where almost everything is the same but something is different, such as a date field being one week later.

[Tony_Campbell]

Hi, and thanks! Let’s just assume that I have no script writing skills. I did play around with automations a bit, but I couldn’t figure how to use it effectively.

I need to create near duplicates. The only thing that should be different is the day. For example, if I take person X to a doctor’s appointment every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’d like to take a blank record (by blank, I mean that I’d like to decide what info is filled in–likely, the person’s name, pickup location, dropoff location, time of pickup, etc would remain the same). But I’d need to take that specific record and duplicate it to show up for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of every week in the future.

I think it would be best to have a button to click with fields you would check or fill would likely yield more customizable results. The way I envision it is to select the record, click, then select the days of the week it needs to be, the start date, and the end date.

Of course, if there are other suggestions, I’m all ears.

I would probably need to have someone else write the script and show me how to integrate it into our database.

[kuovonne]

The process you are describing is rather customized and would probably require a custom script. If you do not have budget for a custom script, I suggest you search these forums for how other people have handled similar situations. There are several options that include 3rd party integrations, Airtable automations without code, and Airtable automations that have code. Find a system that makes sense to you and try it out.

Also keep in mind that it is not realistic to create “indefinite” future records all at once. You can create records up until an end date, or a set number of records at a time. Or you can create one new record every week using an automation which will run until you turn it off. You can also have a single record that resets itself every week.

[Tony_Campbell]

I had a feeling it would take a custom script. Very happy to know it’s possible though.
What sort of budget would that take?

[kuovonne]

Tony_Campbell:

What sort of budget would that take?

I will send you a PM.

[Shmiel_Fish]

i’m looking for something similar

my employees are required to complete a worksheet everyday, many day they work with the same people at the same job site, and ever the job description is sometimes the same, they are currently using Stacker app to fill out their worksheets and feed the info into my AirTable base.

i would like to add a button which when clicked it will create 1 duplicate record

i would love to add 1 condition, the date should automatically be changed to the following day (example, if the original record was dated 6/09/2021 the duplicate record should be 6/10/2021)

my knowledge in script is null, can anyone help me with that?