Auto-populate linked field using formula

[Matt_Kivlin]

Airtable today supports the linking of one table to another via a field, but that field must be populated either by:

• Having the user key/select the appropriate value in the linked field
• Using a manual process to occasionally populate data (i.e. copy/paste)
• Using a 3rd party service like Zapier or Integromat to listen for record changes and populate the value

Option 1 works, but can be annoyingly inefficient from a data entry perspective.
Option 2 is too kludgy and isn’t practical for anything beyond a 1 time data population.
Option 3 adds complexity and the need to learn/bring in another system.

Ideally, there’d be a way to auto-populate the Linked Field using a formula. The linking would either find a correlated record in the linked table, or if none found, then create a new record.

[Matt_Kivlin]

One more update to my original post for those interested. I leveraged the recommendations from the linked post below to use an Automation. I created a couple of fields in my base table. One field that calculates the value I want to populate into the linked field. Another field that compares that value against the current linked field value, which is what’s used to flag records where the linked field value needs to be updated.

I then created an Automation with a Trigger of “When a record matches a condition” (set to key off my calculated field) and a Scripting action. I don’t Javascript but used the code snippet from the linked post and muddled my way through it.

Automatically link record based on plain text or formula result Scripting app

I would like to create a workaround for the issue that Linked Records are not available in Automations. I am collecting lots of URL inputs from colleagues via the web clipper. For a number of reasons I want to link the records to another table automatically, using a script. The idea would be to trigger the script using an Automation. In short: I want the title of the Calculated site to be copied into the linked record field Sites [how to link record] I feel like this should be fairly simpl…

[Clubhouse_X-Pri]

Any further updates?

[Todd_Grier]

After significant frustration and attempts to learn to write scripts (and many failures), I finally happened upon this solution in the Apps Marketplace called ‘Link Records by Field’: Link records by fields - Apps - Airtable Marketplace

It worked on my issue. Hope it works for you all too.

[Kate_Price]

I was able to do this using Airtable Automations.

For some background, data in my base is populated by a Zap that pulls in survey responses from another application. The responses include the title of a webinar (WebinarTitle) attended by the respondent. I wanted to autofill a linked record field (WT) with the webinar title, so that I could have a separate table for information about the webinar.

I set up an update automation with the following steps:

1. Trigger: When a record is created (in my ProdData table)
   

2. Action: Update record (in the same ProdData table). I selected the Airtable record ID from step1 (so that it would select the same record that was just created). Then I told it to update my linked record field (WT) with the text from my WebinarTitle field.
   

First attempt result:
This worked, however any webinar titles that had commas in them split and created multiple records in the linked table, which is not what I wanted. (Note: This only happens if you’re using a field with commas in it. If there are no commas in your data, this error should not occur and the steps up to this point should be enough.)

To fix this error, I followed the instructions in the “Using a formula to add quotes in bulk” section of this article - I created a new formula field (WTx) to treat the title as one chunk of text, rather than a list of items.

This is the formula I used:

‘"’ & {WebinarTitle} & ‘"’

This added quotation marks to the beginning and end of the webinar titles in my WTx field.

Then I went back to the action step of my automation and replaced the WebinarTitle field with my new formula field (WTx).

Second attempt result:
Yay! This did exactly what I wanted it to.

[Anbarasu]

This app worked for me !