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Update record after triggered time not working

J

Use case:
at 8.00am every weekday check table to see which records in a particular view
(view pulls records that meet the following two conditions: 1) Status = SCHEDULED 2) Email to KAE sent (scheduled) = false)
Trigger works
Find action works

I then send out an email to a list of people showing the records in that view
Action works

Then I want to update the records to mark them as processed (which will also take them out of the view)
Action does NOT work

I have tried everything, just cannot get this to work
Screenshot here:

2 replies

ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Brainy
  • 8751 replies
  • March 9, 2022

Yeah, unfortunately, the “find records” action doesn’t work in the way that the vast majority of us Airtable customers actually wanted it to work. It’s extremely disappointing.

The “find records” action will ONLY generate an array of found records — which can be used for sending emails to that array, or dumping that entire array into a single field. But that’s it. You can’t actually loop through the records in the array and update each record individually (unless it’s a found set of only one record).

Since you can dump all the Record ID values into a single field, you might be able to figure out something different that way, but in general, there are only 3 ways to work around this limitation:

  1. Try to completely recreate your automation so that it only triggers on one record at a time (instead of finding a bunch of records).
  2. Write a custom script that updates each record that was found in the “find records” action.
  3. Use an external automation platform like Zapier or Make.com. I prefer Make, because Zapier has its own set of limitations (and is pricier too). But Make is much harder to learn.
J
1 person likes this
  • J
    Jannetje_van_Le
J
ScottWorld wrote:

Yeah, unfortunately, the “find records” action doesn’t work in the way that the vast majority of us Airtable customers actually wanted it to work. It’s extremely disappointing.

The “find records” action will ONLY generate an array of found records — which can be used for sending emails to that array, or dumping that entire array into a single field. But that’s it. You can’t actually loop through the records in the array and update each record individually (unless it’s a found set of only one record).

Since you can dump all the Record ID values into a single field, you might be able to figure out something different that way, but in general, there are only 3 ways to work around this limitation:

  1. Try to completely recreate your automation so that it only triggers on one record at a time (instead of finding a bunch of records).
  2. Write a custom script that updates each record that was found in the “find records” action.
  3. Use an external automation platform like Zapier or Make.com. I prefer Make, because Zapier has its own set of limitations (and is pricier too). But Make is much harder to learn.

thanks ScottWorld
shame!

don’t think my usecase is worth step 2 or 3, so I’ll just process manually for now

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