Conditional Lookup/Data entry

Dean_Moray · ‎Mar 07, 2019

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:.

If the contact is related to a school, I choose the school in the school field and the district field is auto-populated
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.

Justin_Barrett · ‎Mar 07, 2019

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

Justin_Barrett · ‎Mar 07, 2019

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.