Counting records which meet 2-3 criteria for a digest

[automadien]

Hi guys!

So, I’m trying to do something that feels WAY more complicated than it should be.

I have a view which groups records by week, then by type, then by status, and we use this as a dashboard to measure activity. However, we’d like a static report every Monday that summarises the counts in each of these dropdowns, otherwise we’ll need to manually ensure we check it every week and scrape the data on a Monday.

I’ve tried roll-ups and count fields, but the way the base is set up means having a linked field just for this adds an otherwise redundant step into our users’ day. Even just the ability to do a rollup of things tagged as “content type x” within the last week would be better than nothing, but it’s seemingly not possible.

It’s a long-term bug-bear of mine that it’s so weirdly hard to get record counts out of Airtable in an easy way, so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Josie

[Kamille_Parks]

automadien:

Even just the ability to do a rollup of things tagged as “content type x” within the last week would be better than nothing

Can you not have a filtered view that has one filter for “Date field is within one week” and “Content Type = x”?

Otherwise, consider using an Automation that uses the At scheduled time trigger and set the interval to “every week on Monday”. Then you could incorporate one or more Find records steps with conditions that match your groups.

You could use the output of those Find records steps to insert the count of records found into a record in a “Reports” table, and even link all the matching records to the report record for you.

[automadien]

Hy Kamille,

I want the report to go out so it’s a static document that we can look back on and keep record of, rather than a view people have to check and copy/paste out of. That’s why we want it to be the “send digest” automation.

The find records step/find in view step is kind of irrelevant - the problem is the send digest step, which just returns all of the records from step one into a long list without many formatting options - such as counts.There’s not much configuration option here, and when that is 400 records you just get a hugely long e-mail.

[Kamille_Parks]

Assuming the regular Print View functionality is insufficient, and because 400 records is probably not ideal for Page Designer since it doesn’t handle multiple pages too well, I would suggest trying out either Documint or Formstack to generate static PDF reports.

Documint

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formstack.com

Document Generation & Automation | Formstack

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automadien:

The find records step/find in view step is kind of irrelevant

If you want to do anything with a collection of records outside of Airtable, then the Find Records step is important because you’ll need it to do this:

Kamille_Parks:

You could use the output of those Find records steps to insert the count of records found into a record in a “Reports” table, and even link all the matching records to the report record for you.

Any report you build using a 3rd party report generator will need all the records from your view linked to one record.

[automadien]

Hey, I’m really sorry maybe I’m not being clear - the issue isn’t the format that it comes out in, or even what app we use. It’s not where the data comes from, either. The issue is, I want to figure out if there is a way to extract the number of records tagged with a status in one of our multiple select fields.

So the info I have pasted below, where AirTable generates counts for the number of records that fall into each group is what I want - 20 articles published that were tagged as new, etc.

Screenshot 2021-10-05 at 12.07.22|347x500

Josie

[Kamille_Parks]

Okay, you want the number of records which meet certain criteria.

automadien:

a way to extract the number of records tagged

If by this you mean directly reference what is shown in the group headers, no. Those are for show only and are not extractable data points. The reason I keep suggesting to use an Automation with a Find Records step is because it outputs as one of its properties “length”, which is the count of records that met your criteria. If you literally just want the number of records that match a criteria, that’s precisely what Find Records does. What you do with that number is up to you: use it in a Report record like I suggested, put it in the body of an email, etc. You seem to have 4 statuses, so you would use 4 Find Records steps.

Or you could write a script that counts records.

[automadien]

Ok I will give this a go - thanks :slightly_smiling_face: