Prevent Duplicates

[Kelly_Crafts]

Is there a way to prevent duplicate entries in a particular column?
Thank you!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

There is not a way to “prevent” them, but there are various ways to “catch” them once they are created - does that interest you?

The reason you cannot “prevent” them is because there is no real mechanism of “data constraint” in Airtable, other than the “type” of data that can be put in certain fields (only numbers can be entered in a "number field, only dates can be entered in a “date” field, etc).

[Kelly_Crafts]

Catching them would be helpful, yes. Thank you!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Read through this thread, but in particular the post linked to:

[SOLVED] Record Duplication Detection, Deduping, and Duplicate Merging Product Suggestions

I’ve just made available on Google Drive a brief write-up of two approaches to duplication prevention within Airtable, one for de-duplication of an existing base and a second for ongoing duplicate detection. It’s an excerpt (in PDF format) from a larger work-in-progress: a collection of Airtable tips and tricks gleaned from postings in the Support forum, premised on the belief that important and useful information often goes overlooked because it lies buried in a confusingly or uninformatively t…

Here’s another that I’m pretty sure links to the same demo:

Going mad trying to avoid duplicates with ARRAYUNIQUE Ask the community

A-ha! Found it! I’m guessing you have things organized something along the lines of my Filmshoot Demo base, where {Name} is the primary field in the Kit table, and you’re performing a Rollup from Dates to Scenes aggregating on the Scenes->Kit linked record. If you look closely at your failing ARRAYUNIQUE call, you’ll notice the response isn’t Drone, Drone, Crane but actually is Drone, Drone,Crane That is, you’ve rolled up an array with two unique values, Drone and Drone,Crane. Presumably t…

Those are some heavy weight solutions, but a simple solution is to “GROUP” your view by the field (column) you want to be unique - if any two records end up in a group together, you have an indicator that it’s a duplicate.

Lastly, there is hope ahead!! Airtable has a block in beta testing right now called the Dedupe block that should make all of this much easier for the user in the coming months:

[M_k]

Hi Jeremy_Oglesby

Out of curiosity, how do you group views together in a unique field? My key Field is: “SCOTT#”.

Thank you,
Mary

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

You can use the “Group” option in the menu bar:

You pick which field to group by there. Once records are grouped, if they are unique in the field you selected, there will only be ONE record in the group. If there are more than one in a group, then you know you have duplicate data in the field selected.

[Moe]

If those duplicate entries are coming from a form, we’ve built a feature in our form extension that allows you to prevent them.

miniExtensions

Prevent Duplicate Airtable Records in miniExtensions Form

Optional settings to require a unique field value. If the entry is valid, the record will be created/updated. If it's invalid, the user will get an error.