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Help Explain the Dedup Column?

  • 14 October 2020
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Can someone further explain to me the dedup column? I have a google sheet being read as the trigger when a row is updated, and I have it writing to another google sheet as the action (all test stuff). I have set the Trigger column to something like ‘COL$H’, and its looking for cell data within a certain row like ‘Spreadsheet Row D’, the data in the row gets sent to the other google sheet when that data has been updated.

Now the trigger only happens when the cell under ‘COL$H’ and Spreadsheet Row D is updated. Which is how I want it, since the zap would fire too many times otherwise. Can someone explain to me why that works? Why only changing the cell data in COL$H - Row D makes the trigger happen?

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Best answer by Zane 16 October 2020, 18:59

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A bit of info on how to support the Zapier Platform’s duplication mechanism for polling triggers: https://platform.zapier.com/legacy/dedupe

In a nutshell, Zapier maintains a database of every ID that it’s seen since the Zap was turned on, and only processes new IDs.  To support updates, IDs can be synthesized by, for example, combining the “natural” ID with a last updated date, so that the ID used by Zapier will change upon each update and look like a new ID to the de-duper.  The important thing is having an API that returns latest updates first (reverse chronological order).  
 

When the Zap is first turned on Zapier builds the set of IDs that it sees, so that only data created after the Zap is turned on is processed by the Zap.  This is why you don’t instantly get hundreds of tasks the moment you turn your Zap on.  This de-duplication data set is reset each time you pause and turn a Zap back on.