Can You "Write" Data to a field so it cant be changed?

[SparKey]

Hi again,

Is there a way for you to have data from a field "written" to that field and fixed for those changes elsewhere will not affect the result in this field in the future?

An example of this might be;

A fee in one table is designed to be updated in future years, and that field is referred to in other locations. Once that booking has been confirmed and paid, I want to be able to "fix that price" for that booking so that if the lookup value in the first table changes in future, that the confirmed bookings either do not change or, that a field has been updated which then remains at the agreed price.

I hope that makes sense? 

Thanks 

S

[Cobey-Wan · Accepted solution]

Hello there. I believe I understand your issue.

• Your fee price is dynamic and can change at any given time.
• You want to ensure the confirmed booking price reflects the fee cost that was given at the time/date of booking.
• You do not want a booked price to change once the booking is complete, even if the fee cost changes after.

You certainly don't want the booked price to change after it's been confirmed! My best suggestion would be to utilize the Airtable Automation Features. You will need to create one additional field (type: single line text) for this solution to work.

• Set an automation trigger to watch for new confirmed bookings (I'm not sure if you have a field to show whether a booking is confirmed or not, but a check box for example could work).
• When a new booking confirmation is found (when the automation trigger gets triggered), you will use the "Update Record" feature to copy the current fee price, to the newly created field we can call "confirmed booking fee" (or something similar that fits your naming convention)
• The fee cost values in the new field are static and will not change 

This will allow you to have a field containing the fee cost that was given at the time/date of any specific booking, regardless of the current fee price. Once confirmation of a booking takes place, your fee price during the time of booking will be set in stone.

Please let me know if you have any questions so I can further assist you.

🤘Airtable Rocks 🤘

[SparKey]

This was absolutely spot on! This was exactly what I was looking for and so well explained. Thank you so much for your help with this. I knew there would be a way to do it, but I couldn't get my head around how it would work. 

I am used to having to do this in an offline DB where you would do this function at the point of running an action. 

Thanks again.

S