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  • Zap to Airtable: *Adding* new data to a cell without *overwriting* existing data

Hi!

 

I’m trying to build a series of Zaps to push data from different sources to an Airtable. What I’m hoping to do is have, in certain cells, data *added* to cells when a record is updated -- instead of overwriting the data in the existing cell. 

There doesn’t seem to be a natural way to do this; I was curious if there was syntax I could add to a field to make it additive? Or another tricky solution?

 

Thanks!

Hi @Chris Harring!

Did someone say “tricky solution”? That’s my specialty :wink: 

There's a neat little workaround for when you'd like to append something to a field rather than overwrite :)

Trigger: Whatever you'd like
Action: Find X (contact, lead, account, etc)
Action: Create/Update X (sometimes it's JUST Update)

Essentially, you're re-adding what was already there and then mapping the field that you want to append.

Does that make sense? Please let me know if anything in unclear and I’ll be happy to elaborate on it for you :)

 

So that seems great, but fields that are Formulas a/o Long Text don’t appear as fields that were found in the previous “search” steps when I try the “Update Airtable Record” step.

I’m basically trying to get to:

  CommentField = NewComment & “\n” & CommentField (\n is a carriage return)

So that the new comment is added as the new top line of the Long Text CommentField… this creates a “running commentary” of comments.  When I go to make that “formula” in Zapier, the Long Text CommentField is not available for selection, nor is the Airtable Formula field I created which does this concatenation in Airtable.

Also, the “formula” icon on the right side of the Zapier input row seems to have disappeared?  Now I just get a drop-down to select a subset of the fields from the records from previous steps.

Thanks so much for the help, this one has me vexed!!!

Hi @Captain Cosmo!

Are you sure you’re looking up the right record? Can you elaborate a bit on what your workflow looks like? Maybe include some screenshots?

So, for example, do you have Table A where you add new records, then find a record in Table B by one of the fields, then you want to append something from the Table A record? Just making sure I understand the bigger picture for your desired workflow.

Thanks!

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