Delete a record

You’ve stumbled upon 2 of the limitations of Airtable: you can’t delete a record through Airtable’s native automation tools, and there is no cascading delete (i.e. delete a parent record, and then all the children records get automatically deleted).

Your only 2 workarounds for doing either of these things are:

1. High-code: Write your own custom JavaScript.

2. Low-code: Use Make’s Airtable automations, which is what you are already doing.

Hi @cshenoy86,

You could try setting up an automation within Airtable without using external tools structured in the following way: set the trigger as "when a record matches condition" and look at when the lookup/linked field from the second table is empty - this assumes that the record should never not be linked to the other table - not even upon creation.

If the linking happens as a second step, then you could have another automation that checks when a record is linked and based on that checks a checkbox field - this would then require the trigger for the first automation to be checking for two conditions:
- the checkbox being checked (which means that at some point a record was connected)
- the linked field being empty
I hope this has been helpful to you.

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Thank you! Hopefully they come up with the Delete record feature in future.

Yes that is what I did but externally using Make Integromat. I will definitely try it using Airtable automation as well. Thanks for your suggestion! However still for deleting a record, currently there is no automation step available right? One can create, update, find records and send email but there is no action type called 'Delete record'. That I think can be achieved by running a script only. 

Hi there!

At miniExtensions, we’ve made it easy to delete specific records in Airtable with our Autodelete records on Airtable automation. This tool allows you to automatically delete records from specific tables and views with as much filtering precision as you need.

Our automations can be scheduled to run at specific intervals, or they can be used as scripts within Airtable, allowing you to trigger deletions based on conditions, such as when a record enters a view, meets specific criteria, or when a button is pressed. Just create one copy of the automation per table that should be scanned when a deletion is triggered and configure the conditions.

In your case, you can mark the records you want deleted in the main table with a checkbox and then trigger the deletion of those records having the miniExtensions automation check for a marked checkbox. To delete the associated records, you can use a conditions to search for non-linked records. Or, if you need to filter it further because you have many unlinked records that don't have to be deleted, you could have a checkbox that indicates that a specific record was linked before (for this, you could use an Airtable automation that updates a checkbox when the linked record field is populated).