Airtable automation action: Find records

To start creating an automation, from the open base of your choice click on Automations in the upper left corner of your screen to open the automation configuration window. Click the + Create automation option to begin the setup process. If you would like, you can rename the automation right away to make it easier to understand what it does.

Next, you will need to click + Add trigger option. Once clicked, the available triggers will display for you to choose from. Click here to learn more about all available automation triggers . Once you have configured and tested the trigger, you can move on to the next step.

1. Click the + Add advanced logic or action option.

2. Scroll down in the menu that appears, then find and click on the “Find records” option.

1. Feel free to enter a description of what the action will do. You can always add one later if you prefer to skip this step.

2. Under “Configuration,” first select the Table where you would like to have the automation find records.

3. Next, click the dropdown to Find records based on one of these two options

   1. Condition - This option allows you to use a set of specified conditions to find one or more records. Click + Add condition to begin configuring the first condition. Continue this process as needed.

      1. You can choose to combine conditions using either an “And” conjunction or an “Or” conjunction.

      2. You can add up to 50 conditions.

      3. For more information about using conditional logic in Airtable, please consult this support article.

   2. View - This option is a good one to use if you have already set up specific conditions in a view in the underlying base. Click on Select a view and then click the view of your choice.

Note

By default there is a limit of 1000 records per “Find records” action. In some cases, a custom limit may have been set that is lower than the 1000 record limit. If you have a view or condition that returns more than 1000 records, then adding multiple find records steps to query different views or conditions is the best workaround.

After you've found the records you are looking for, you can add another action to determine what step to take with those records (as long as at least one record was found).

• You might consider using the “Sort list” action step to sort the output list of records in some expected way that makes sense for your workflow. (ex. sort the records by soonest due date, alphabetically, numerically ascending by order number, etc.)

• For example, if your "Find records" action found one record, you can choose to update that record using the update record action. Note that the "update record" action only supports updating a single record. Meaning, that you can use the "Find records" action to find and pass a single record to the "update record" action to update that record. For automations where multiple records might be found, use the repeating groups functionality to have the action perform multiple updates across multiple records.

• Another example workflow would be to find a list of records with impending dates, then use the "Send email" action to automatically email those records to a colleague. You are free to use any automation action that's most helpful for your workflow.

Note

If you'd like to see an example of using the "Find Record" action in a multistep workflow (coupled with the "Update Record" action) check out this guide on linking existing records.

Again, be sure to test all of the steps in the automation that you are building. Once every part of the automation has tested successfully, you’ll likely be ready to turn the automation on. Find the red colored “OFF” toggle and click it so the automation now appears as “ON” in green.

• By default, there is a limit of up to 1000 records that a “Find records” action can find per automation run.

• A user with creator permissions can adjust this setting from within the automation’s configuration window by clicking the box below the “Maximum record limit” section and inputting a lower number.

Automations run on GMT since that is the default timezone that Airtable operates on behind the scenes. When setting up time-based conditions in automations you may need to adjust times manually or create a formula to auto-adjust times so that the conditions evaluate according to your timezone.

A no-code way of accomplishing this is to utilize conditional logic in automations to prevent automation runs when no records are found. There is also a workaround in which you can insert a Run a script action after the Find records step to achieve this —  check out the video here to guide you through how to do it.

Here's the script in the video above ( Note: you will still need to set the input variable as shown in the video):

let numRecordsFound = input.config().numRecordsFound;if (numRecordsFound < 1) {throw Error("No records were found.")}

Some email servers will decline emails containing large email bodies. For this reason, Airtable limits the number of records that can be included in an email to 100 records. In cases where an automation may be utilizing a find records action, more than 100 records may be found. Therefore, the resulting email would provide a truncated list or grid of records. As a workaround, we recommend batching found records in 100 record batches and breaking up those batches into multiple emails.