Help

The Community will be temporarily unavailable starting on Friday February 28. We’ll be back as soon as we can! To learn more, check out our Announcements blog post.

Conditional Lookup/Data entry

Topic Labels: Formulas
Solved
Jump to Solution
2406 1
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Dean_Moray
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Newbie here.

I have a school table with a list of schools, a School district table, and a Contacts table.

Schools are linked to school districts.

Contacts can be linked to a school OR a school district.

What I am trying to do is enter a new contact in the contacts table:.

  1. If the contact is related to a school, I choose the school in the school field and the district field is auto-populated
  2. If the contact is a district contact (no school) I want to be able to type in or choose the district in the same District field.

I don’t know how to accomplish both in the same district field.

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
Justin_Barrett
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Doing #1 is fairly easy, but adding #2 is not possible…at least, not without help. Airtable fields can’t switch behavior based on various parameters. The data can be manually entered, or dynamically-generated (formula, lookup, etc), but not both.

However, using Zapier or Integromat, you could probably make it work. First, the District field in your Contacts table would be a link to the School Districts table. In the integration service of your choice, you could set up a trigger for when a new contact record is made. If that record has a school selected, the zap/scenario would look up the school’s district and set that value in the District field. Otherwise the field would be left alone so that you could manually link to a district.

See Solution in Thread

1 Reply 1
Justin_Barrett
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Doing #1 is fairly easy, but adding #2 is not possible…at least, not without help. Airtable fields can’t switch behavior based on various parameters. The data can be manually entered, or dynamically-generated (formula, lookup, etc), but not both.

However, using Zapier or Integromat, you could probably make it work. First, the District field in your Contacts table would be a link to the School Districts table. In the integration service of your choice, you could set up a trigger for when a new contact record is made. If that record has a school selected, the zap/scenario would look up the school’s district and set that value in the District field. Otherwise the field would be left alone so that you could manually link to a district.