No problem.
In your refreshData method, I’m not seeing where you define the options object. But let’s assume you’ve not included that here and that the code flow down through name and owner give you exactly what you need …
With that, here’s what you want to do. I’ll describe it first in plain text, and then with code.
You’ll need a way to identify exactly which record in the “Records list” table that you want to update. There are two ways to do that: you can either pass the id in from a prior step in the automation, or you can use code to find the record in question. I’ll give examples of both below.
First example - where the id of the row you want to update is passed in from a prior step in the automation. For example, let’s say you had a checkbox column in your “Records list” table called “Refresh playlist”. And the automation triggered anytime the checkbox was checked. In that case, you would create an input in your code: when you are in the code editor, on the left side, click the blue link that reads “+ Add input variable”. And then give it a name like “recordId” (without the quotes). And the Value will be Airtable record ID from the previous step. With that, you are ready to wire-up the update like this:
let table = base.getTable('Records list');
await table.updateRecordAsync(recordId, {
'Playlist': name,
'Owner': owner
})That’s it. No need to loop. No need to select any records. Why? Because you already know EXACTLY which record to update - the one given by the recordId that was passed in.
Second example - where you do NOT know ahead of time exactly which record needs to be updated. In THAT case, then we’ll need to loop through the records to find the one to update. Like this:
let table = base.getTable('Records list');
let allRecords = table.selectRecordsAsync({ fields:
[ "Playlist", "Owner" ]
})
for (let record of allRecords) {
let recordOwner = record.getCellValueAsString("Owner")
if (recordOwner === owner) {
await table.updateRecordAsync(recordId, {
'Playlist': name,
})
}
break
}Now, let’s walk through what we’re doing here. First, we get all the records in the “Records list” table. Note that when you are calling the selectRecordsAsync function, you want to pass in which fields you want to get back.
The line that reads "for (let record of allRecords)" is simply saying this: "Let's loop over all the rows in this table, and we'll take each one and stick it into a variable named record." You can just as easily have written "let abc of allRecords", in which each, the loop will stick each row into a variable named "abc".
Then, once we have the list of all records, we’ll loop through them. And what we’re looking for is the record that has an owner that matches the owner returned from your fetch call. To do that, we need to get the text of the owner field from each row. Which we do with the line that reads "let recordOwner = record.getCellValueAsString("Owner")". Now the recordOwner variable will contain whatever is in the owner field as we loop through each row in the table.
Then the “if” statement is comparing the owner in each row of the table (recordOwner) with the owner returned by the fetch. And if it finds a match, then it updates that one record with the new Playlist info. Note that I may not fully understand your use-case, but hopefully what I’m describing makes sense. Also, further complicating your specific example is that you have a table of records, which I assume contains actual music records, which is cool. But the word “record” also means a row in an Airtable table. So the wording can get a little mixed up.
Anyway, after we found the row where the owner matches, then we do the update. And notice that we only updated the Playlist entry. No need to update the Owner field because we don’t need to change it. When you do an update like this, you only need to specify the fields that are actually changing.
And then after the update, we “break” from the loop. In other words, there is no need to continue looping though all records - we already found the owner. So we can speed up the code by breaking from the loop.
Now a great question to ask yourself here is this: “what if there is more than one possible match”? Well, that’s where you need to think through your use case. Because the code above will only update the FIRST owner match. If you remove the break, then the code above will update that playlist for EVERY owner match - which may, or may not, be what you want.
But hopefully this gives you a brief overview of finding and updating records using code in Airtable. Notice how short the code is. Yes, I include a lot of written text here - but only to help acclimate you to the concepts. Once you get a few of these under your belt, you’ll be flying on your own.
Also, don’t hesitate to play around in the code. Drop in “console.log” statements all over the place so you can see exactly what is happening. You’ll soon find yourself saying, “ohhh, that’s how that works.”
And, don’t hesitate to reach back into the community with any questions you have. The combination of Airtable and coding is incredibly powerful. It opens a world of opportunities for you.
