Zapier: Find Linked Records

[Robert_Salesas]

I have a table with a remotely linked record, and when a record is added it fires a Zap. The Zap then needs to find the linked record in the other table. I cannot figure out how to look for the ID that I receive with the record. For example:

Table 1 (Employee): Name
Table 2 (Holiday): Date, Employee

When a row is added to Holiday I get a zap with the date, and an ID that links to Employee table. There appears to be no way to retrieve the Employee record to get the name. How can I do that?

[Julian_Kirkness]

This is actually quite straightforward but seems to require the creation of a new formula field in the Employee table to show the Record ID:

Once you have this you can use a Find Record action in Zapier (based upon a new record trigger in the Holiday table) like this:

Subsequent steps in your Zap will then have access to all the fields in the related Employee record.

Alternative

There is a simpler (though less flexible way to do this as well - which is to place a Lookup field on the Holiday table to retrieve the field you want from Employees - the down side is that you have to have a lookup field for each field you want to access:

I hope this helps - the combination of Zapier and Airtable is pretty cool!

Julian

[jord8on]

Hello @Julian_Kirkness and thanks for your answer here.

It seems this feature has been updated b/c I have one linked column grabbing the generic record name that I’ve supplied and not referencing the actual RecordID.

On another note I have a question you may be able to help with.

Going with this example here…

Table 1 (Employee): Name
Table 2 (Holiday): Date, Employee

What if my Zap is trying to populate an “Employee” name (Table 2) but that person does not yet exist in the Employee Table (Table 1). Is there a way to provision new employess to Table 1?

I’m getting an error:

We had trouble sending your test through.

The app returned “Value “JORDAN TEST” is not a valid record ID. Could not find record with matching name and we can not create linked records because their primary field is computed”. This can occur if the information entered into a field is not in the correct format. Double-check that you are using the correct format for entering values into a field. They link to this help doc.

My scenario:
I have Table 1 my list of Customers.
In Table 2 I have a Zapier zap set up to pull in new orders from Woocommerce and create a new record for each “line item” purchase on my site.

Each of the new records coming into Table 2 are new customers, and therefore are not in the Table 1 datablase of customers.

What’s the workaround here to start building my Table 1 list of customers, based on the data coming in from Table 2?

[Jessa_Green]

Have you tried using the Zapier step to “find” the record from Table 2 in Table 1, and if the record doesn’t exist, Create It (from within the Zap)?

[jord8on]

That could work but I’m on the free version and you have to pay in order to have multi-step Zaps. :thinking: