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Conditional Lookup/Data entry

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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.

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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.