That puts you at the head of the class, as this convenient function is one of Airtable’s best little-known secrets. :winking_face: I’ve used it to create as many as 468 new linked records at a time, which to me takes it out of the realm of ‘clever hack’ and into that of ‘essential functionality.’
Not Airtable, but Zapier. (And presumably Integromat, et al. — that is, using a third-party integration service.)
To do it fully automatically, you’ll have to put up with non-realtime performance. All integration tools (to the best of my knowledge) work off a polled trigger: An updated record does not directly trigger the service. Instead, the service checks Airtable for new records or new records in a view on anywhere from a 1- to a 15-minute cycle, depending on the service and the level of account. (There is a way to hack together a somewhat more realtime-ish response using a Slack channel to trigger the integrator; search Community posts for ‘Slack’ for more info. In my experience, response time can vary greatly, from seconds to 5+ minutes, depending on [presumably] current Airtable and Slack load levels.)
If you don’t mind a little manual effort, you can create a custom URL as part of the record that sends to a Zapier (et al.) webhook. This provides near-instantaneous response, but it does require one to select the URL. I’m currently playing around with the Chrome Zapier plugin to see if it might provide a similar function a little more seamlessly.
If you need a fully automated, ‘pure’ Airtable solution, you’re currently out of luck. I’m hoping that as Airtable becomes a more robust platform for application development, it will backfill functionality it now lacks. In that case, such a workaround might be only a short-term annoyance.
