Add Child Records without Spawning New Parent Records

[John_Fabrega]

I have created tables for our customers and the text messages we send/receive through our landline texting service.

I built the parent/child relationship but have found that when a new record is added to the text table, it automatically creates a new customer. Some texts are with vendors and the occasional inbound spam. They don’t need to be added to the customer table. Is there a way to only link to existing records vs automatically creating a record. Orphans are ok in this scenario.

[kuovonne]

Linking to an existing record will depend on how your new record and how the new customer are created. Are you using a Zapier or Integromat integration? If so, you will need rework the integration to do a search for the existing customer instead of creating a new customer.

[John_Fabrega]

Thanks for Jumping in @kuovonne.

I’m using Zapier to collect the texts and push them to the Texts table in Airtable, however when a new record (phone number) is added to the Texts table (which is fine) it does a link to the Parent (customers) table and adds a blank record in the customers table. I’m not sure that Zapier can look that deep AND I still want the texts in the log. I just don’t want them in the customer table. Does that make sense?