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How to change field from linked to single select without messing up automations?

  • December 15, 2024
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Hi,

Due to rebuilding a lot of our automation to accommodate segment/tag based filtering for e-mail, I need to change my TAG fields. The TAG is a segment or interest area (e.g. nature, sports, food etc), and until now I have used this as linked records from a master TAG table. The automations I built require however the TAG field to be a single select, so I need to transform all of my linked record TAG fields to single selects.

If I just change the field from linked record to single select I nicely get the existing values converted into single select values, but it seems all automations where this variable has been used break. There are quite a few automations and it feels both very time consuming and risky to re-build all these by hand.

Can you think of another way to "convert" the existing TAG field to the single select type without breaking the automations?

Cheers,

Björn

Best answer by ScottWorld

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do. Are you trying to perform a "Find Records" step based on a linked record field?

If there's only going to be one value in your linked record field, you could just create a formula field that equals the linked record field and use that formula field for your search criteria.

If there's going to be more than one value in your linked record field, then you will need to use a repeating group to loop through the values of the linked record field.

However, note that Airtable has lots of limitations in their automations. For example, once you add a repeating group to your automation, you are not allowed to add any other repeating groups (if you need them) and you are not allowed to add any conditional actions (if you need them).

So all of this really limits the usefulness of Airtable's automations. If Airtable's automations are too limited for you in these regards, then you can always turn to Make's advanced Airtable automations, which gives you significantly more control over repeating groups and conditional paths with absolutely NO LIMITATIONS at all.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

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  • December 15, 2024

There is no way to convert without re-doing your automations, but is there a reason that you need to convert from a linked record field to a single-select field? Linked record fields give you way more flexibility.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

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  • December 15, 2024
ScottWorld wrote:

There is no way to convert without re-doing your automations, but is there a reason that you need to convert from a linked record field to a single-select field? Linked record fields give you way more flexibility.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


The reason is that with Linked Records I cannot use TAG dynamically in automations. There were two lengthy discussion on that topic, and then I concluded it wasn't possible to keep the Linked Records:

But maybe you know a way to keep using the Linked Records in this scenario, maybe I did something wrong in my earlier tests?

Rgds,

Björn

ScottWorld
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  • December 15, 2024

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do. Are you trying to perform a "Find Records" step based on a linked record field?

If there's only going to be one value in your linked record field, you could just create a formula field that equals the linked record field and use that formula field for your search criteria.

If there's going to be more than one value in your linked record field, then you will need to use a repeating group to loop through the values of the linked record field.

However, note that Airtable has lots of limitations in their automations. For example, once you add a repeating group to your automation, you are not allowed to add any other repeating groups (if you need them) and you are not allowed to add any conditional actions (if you need them).

So all of this really limits the usefulness of Airtable's automations. If Airtable's automations are too limited for you in these regards, then you can always turn to Make's advanced Airtable automations, which gives you significantly more control over repeating groups and conditional paths with absolutely NO LIMITATIONS at all.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

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ScottWorld wrote:

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do. Are you trying to perform a "Find Records" step based on a linked record field?

If there's only going to be one value in your linked record field, you could just create a formula field that equals the linked record field and use that formula field for your search criteria.

If there's going to be more than one value in your linked record field, then you will need to use a repeating group to loop through the values of the linked record field.

However, note that Airtable has lots of limitations in their automations. For example, once you add a repeating group to your automation, you are not allowed to add any other repeating groups (if you need them) and you are not allowed to add any conditional actions (if you need them).

So all of this really limits the usefulness of Airtable's automations. If Airtable's automations are too limited for you in these regards, then you can always turn to Make's advanced Airtable automations, which gives you significantly more control over repeating groups and conditional paths with absolutely NO LIMITATIONS at all.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


I think you've just saved my not only day, but week. Yes, you understood the need right, and there will ever be only one TAG value at the time. I had tried different variants of Lookup and Rollups to arrive at something Airtable would allow to be used in Find Records step as a variable, but nothing worked. Mirroring the TAG field to a formula field seems to work just like a Single Select.

Here's an example where a record matching certain conditions would trigger a mail "No show" to be sent. The mail content should be different dependent on the TAG on the originating record, thus needing to use that as a variable in the Find step. 

In the image you can see different variants I've tested, but the Lookups and Rollups are greyed out and give an error "No valid nested options". The new Formula field test "TAG TEST FORMULA" works.

I need to go through this in all my scenarios, but I do think this allows me to stick to using a central TAGs table and Linked Records.

So, THANK YOU @ScottWorld!

Rgds,

Björn

 

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