I have a base that I use for reporting. It syncs tables from other bases into it, and automations run weekly to send reports on the synced data.
It appears that the data syncs are not triggered before the reporting automations are triggered, so the reports are sending out stale data. I believe Airtable pushes the syncs when a base is used regularly by humans, but not sure if the same is true for automations. I’ve tried having a daily automation that creates a record in a separate table hoping that would trigger the syncs in the background, but no luck.
Anyone have a way to keep synced tables updated in the background?
Yes, as far as I am aware, it seems like BOTH syncs AND automations need to have their bases “woken up” in order to sync or run automations.
One way of waking up the bases would be to create a “dummy automation” in each base that runs on a schedule. The automation wouldn’t really do anything in particular. It might just perform a “Find Records” on the base and that’s it.
That should hopefully solve the problem for you.
I did try the dummy automation route by creating a “Data Checks” table that just creates a record each day. But it probably doesn’t work because it doesn’t actually query the tables I care about.
Going to add the Find Records action this time and see if that works. Thanks @ScottWorld!
Hmm… very interesting… please keep me posted on this!
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