Hello,
I feel rather stupid. Should be easy enough but I can’t find an answer. I know how to create a new record in an automation and then list all the fields and have them updated with the value of the previous record (which triggered).
But, that is cumbersome at best. When it’s only a handful fields ok fine. But I have tables where the number of fields exceeds 100 already. I am not going to sit and manually duplicate each field.
I am sure I am missing something. Can you please tell me how I can have an automation simply duplicate all fields.
Thanks
Hi @Bettina,
As far as I know, there is no automated way to duplicate a record in Airtable. (Maybe it can be done with scripting, but I didn’t see it listed anywhere in the scripting documentation.)
I know that more advanced database systems like FileMaker offer the ability to automate the duplication of records with a high degree of control, but with a more basic database system like Airtable, my guess is that they didn’t add this into the product in an effort to help prevent people from making a catastrophic mistake such as an endless loop that would fill up an entire base in a short amount of time with the same exact record.
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Duplicating a record can be done with scripting. However very rarely does one want an exact duplicate. Usually at least one or two fields need to be different, which leads to wanting a custom script.
On the other hand, I can see a use case where an automation script duplicates a record, and then a later automation action changes a couple of values. I’ll see about adding a script to my automation helpers.
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Can you help me find this in Airtable’s scripting documentation?
It isn’t a single function in scripting, so it isn’t part of the documentation.
Scripting documentation is like a listing of all the Lego bricks available and a few examples of things you can build. The documentation has very limited documentation for assembling bricks.
Oh okay, then it sounds like I was correct in what I said originally, which is that duplication doesn’t exist natively in Airtable.
If you have to create a new record and then set all the fields, then that’s already available in Airtable’s native automations, which is what @Bettina didn’t want to do.
Creating a record and setting fields is also available in Make or any other automation tool as well.
But there is no “duplicate” function.
I am working on a script that will duplicate a record without having to manually set all the individual fields.
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Hi Kuovnne,
Yes it is one of those rare cases.
Everytime I set up such an automation and have to manually add the fields I make mistakes. Takes me forever to have the correct ones in there and it is a cumbersome process.
Easy would be “create record” and “copy values of these” as a list to tick them on 
Nice! I love it!
But still, behind the scenes, the core concept of your script is that you are grabbing a list of all the fields in the table, grabbing the values from each of the fields that you just discovered, and then setting each field individually. So behind the scenes, it is still “create record then set fields”.
But yes, I agree that your script will be very easy & useful for people who want to quickly duplicate records.
@Bettina The script is now in my Gumroad store. You can see a video demo here.
My video demo here includes one way of avoiding this endless loop.
The video demo also shows how to make one-off changes to fields when you want to duplicate all fields, but then immediately alter a handful of fields.
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