Automating routine tasks just got a whole lot easier! Using a Quickbase automation to delete child records when the parent record is deleted will not only save you time, but also keep your Quickbase nice and tidy.
Bonus: This training also utilizes the NEW Builder Program where you can access a FREE personal Quickbase license.
It's easy to orphan child records by deleting the parent and be left with the aftermath.
Do you often find orphan records in your Quickbase and aren't sure if they need to be deleted or assigned to a parent?
Do you dread the cleanup necessary before (or after) deleting parent records?
Do others create extra work for you by not deleting orphaned records when they should?
In this tutorial on Quickbase Automations, I'll take you through each step to set up an automation to delete the child record of any parent that is deleted.
Create a new automation with a trigger
Set the action(s) and save
Test the results
As you get started with Automations, please be cautious and heed the warnings I share in this training.
Otherwise, have fun and enjoy saving boatloads of time!
FROM THE VIDEO: "...for this example I've got two tables projects and tasks projects are the parent of tasks let's take a look at projects here you can see a number of projects that also have a number of tasks related to them typically if we were to delete one of these projects those poor tasks well they'd be orphaned they no longer be associated to any parent because that parent record doesn't exist well we can fix that from ever happening again using a Quickbase automation to set up an automation we'll open the settings you can access the settings for automations on any table or in the application settings itself we'll choose automations here I'll add a new automation and I'll choose when data changes I'll name my automation and then set my trigger the trigger is what tells the automation to run in this case we're going to want to choose deletes a record and then uncheck adds a record the table that is triggering this automation will be the project's table we could also set some additional criteria that would help filter the conditions in which our automation runs in this case though I'm going to keep it simple and move on to adding our action the action is what we want to have happen after the trigger is initiated here what we want to do is delete records so I'll choose this option it'll ask where we want to delete records from and using some logic it'll display the options that you have so it gives us the option of deleting tasks with that selected I can now choose which tasks I want to have deleted again because of the logic that they've built into these automations it's already populating for me the option that I need what I need to identify is the related project for any task that's the same as the one that I just deleted to trigger the automation so you can see here the related project is set equal to the value of the trigger projects record ID this is exactly what we need in order to make sure that we are only deleting those tasks that are related to the project before I close out I want to point to the comments so you could also add a longer narrative if you needed to in order to explain what this automation does I'll go ahead and save now and we can return back to our Quickbase with that automation all set up let's take a quick peek at what will happen once we trigger it first let's look at the tasks you can see here I have 41 tasks that number is going to change once we initiate that automation back on our projects table I'm going to delete the wireless initiative project here you see there are three tasks associated with it I'll click delete and the project has been successfully deleted now you notice there was no notification of any sort that my automation ran it happens in the background but let's take a look at what the results were back on our tasks table we now see we have 38 tasks no longer 41 those three tasks are associated with the project I deleted were in fact also deleted successfully..."
