How to expand search functionality in Airtable

[Cara_Haynes]

Here’s a short Loom video that explains my question with examples:

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm! If you have a lot of automations to spare, you could:

1. Create a new table called Search or something
2. Create a new field in Content called “URL Match” or some such
3. Create an automation that triggers when a new record gets created in Search, and its action would be to find records in the Content table that match the URL in this newly created record, and then update the URL Match field

Your workflow would then be to go to your Sheet, grab the URLs, paste them into the Search table, creating one new record per URL, and the automation would look in the Content table for records matching each URL that was pasted in, does that make sense?

If you don’t have automations to spare, you’d probably need to make a scripting extension for this I think, and you’d just have a textbox and paste the URLs in, run the extension, and it’d automagically update the URL Match field on its own

You can also hire me to set up either option for you too if you don’t want to deal with it!

[Bill_French]

Adam_TheTimeSavingCo:

Your workflow would then be to go to your Sheet, grab the URLs, paste them into the Search table, creating one new record per URL, and the automation would look in the Content table for records matching each URL that was pasted in, does that make sense?

Um, yes. But that really doesn’t advance the process since there are so many manual steps. I would approach it this way @Cara_Haynes -

1. Find a way to sync your GA list into an Airtable table.
2. Create a relational reference between your cards and the GA list; now you have all related GA URLs in your card view

Optionally, you may want to abstract the GA URLs list from the cards with an intermediate view so that you can manage the ebb and flow of the analytics results.

#1 can be done with Make, Zapier, or an Airtable-based script. Data Fetcher also has a pretty good solution for this.

[Cara_Haynes]

Thank you! This does seem like it would solve my problem.

[Cara_Haynes]

Thank you for your response, Bill! Could you explain to me more what you mean by relational reference? I’m still relatively new to Airtable. Also, how would I abstract the GA URLs from the cards with an intermediate view and what exactly is an intermediate view? If it would be easier for you to explain this over video, I would very much appreciate it if you could make a Loom video explaining your process by showing me in Airtable, but I also understand if that would be too much work to replicate the same scenario.

[Bill_French]

Cara_Haynes:

Could you explain to me more what you mean by relational reference?

Yeah, it’s just like a spreadsheet lookup from the cards table to the synched list of URLs. These are linked records and Airtable does this with easy. Once linked, you can click on a card item and see the reference to the URL(s) data.

Cara_Haynes:

how would I abstract the GA URLs from the cards with an intermediate view and what exactly is an intermediate view?

An intermediate view is a dynamic Airtable View that allows you to scope a subset of the total data. I mentioned this only because I saw that your URLs table could be large, and it seemed like you probably were working on subsets of that data from time-to-time.

Cara_Haynes:

I would very much appreciate it if you could make a Loom video explaining your process

I would love to but massively slammed at my day job. I’ll bet there are some other community helpers who can step up and help. But I would first give it a try because the Airtable tutorials are actually quite good and a simply example from them will switch on the light. :winking_face:

[Cara_Haynes]

Hi, Adam!

I’m trying out your solution. I got the first part to work (setting up the trigger that finds records in the Content tab that match new records in the Search tab). But I’m stumped on how to get the Update Record action to only update the records that have been found. It doesn’t seem to be an option to choose in the Record ID field of the Update Record action. Could you help me see where I’m going wrong? Thank you so much!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hi Cara, the Update Record action would update the original triggering record, specifically it would update its linked field to the Content table with the ID of the record it found in the Find Records action, does that make sense?

[Cara_Haynes]

Hi, Adam,

Maybe I’ve just done these in the wrong order, but I’m having trouble getting the Update action to use what was found in the Find Records action. I made a short Loom video showing the issue I’m running into.

https://www.loom.com/share/36436dbd44d44e8d8a1c2f91c7d0d981

[Cara_Haynes]

Hi, Adam,

Maybe I’ve just done these in the wrong order, but I’m having trouble getting the Update action to use what was found in the Find Records action. I made a short Loom video showing the issue I’m running into.