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Re: Does anyone know how to 2-way sync AirTable data?

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Durthpreet_Syan
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hi everyone,

I love the new syncing features but has anyone managed to work around the 1-way syncing?

You can’t edit cells that are in the synced database even if it’s a dropdown list.

6 Replies 6

Hello and welcome to the Community @Durthpreet_Syan!

When a Sync is active—a destination table will replicate all changes made to a source table, so you cannot make any changes to either the records or fields in the destination table. You can “unsync” a table if you’d like to move some information into a new table and then change that information. However, once a table is “unsynced” any changes made to that table will be erased if the sync is reestablished.

Demo+Lessonly+Base_+New+Bugs+2021-04-29+at+1.23.55+PM

Let me know if I can help provide any more information, and if this helped answer your question please mark it as the solution :white_check_mark: .

Welcome to the Airtable community!

You cannot directly edit synced data in a synced table. There are some workarounds. They are both very limited, but do allow for some edits.

  • If you have permissions for the original base, you can create a button that opens the original record in the original base to make edits.

  • You can use a system with a button to open a prefilled form, and a scripting automation to make changes to the original record. Clicking the button opens a new browser window with the current values prefilled, including prefilling a text field with the record id of the original record. The user edits the values in the form. After the user submits the form, the automation in the source table finds the original record, updates the original record with the new data, and deletes the record submitted in the form.

A slightly more complex method involves having fields in your synced table for new values, then a button or automation that runs a script that calls a webhook automation in the source base that updates the original record.

One problem with all of these systems is that the new values will not show up until the next time the table is synced. You can manually trigger a sync if you do not want to wait for the next autosync.

That’s genius @kuovonne!

Taryn_Pastoor
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

If you have permissions for the original base, you can create a button that opens the original record in the original base to make edits.

@kuovonne – This is exactly what I’d like to do! Can you give guidance on how to set up this button?

Create a button field in the synced table with the “Open source record” action.
See this support article for more info.

matthew_b
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hi @Durthpreet_Syan! Not sure if you already found a solution for this, but we just launched support for Airtable x Airtable 2-way sync. Happy to share more about it if helpful :slightly_smiling_face: .