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A delivery has arrived at the warehouse. Its header is already in the Documents table, but the detail — which products, in what quantities — is still missing. Before those lines turn up, you are going to build the automation that will greet them: the one that attaches each of them, on its own, to the right product and the right document.

Your base does not ship with this automation — you create it yourself, and you create it first, so that the moment the lines arrive they link themselves. It is your first automation of the course, so we lay it out one piece at a time, with the plugin alongside you: walking you through each piece, or simply checking the finished result.

A SeaTable automation always follows the same pattern: a trigger — the event that sets it off — followed by one or more actions. For the one you need here, that comes down to:

Trigger: New row in the Line items table

First action: Add links between Line items and Products — by comparing  Product reference (Line items) and  Reference (Products)

Second action: Add links between Line items and Documents — by comparing  Document reference (Line items) and  Delivery reference (Documents)

You build it in your base, with the online courses plugin as your companion. Activate it in your base if not already done, and then open it and select Step 2.

It starts by asking whether you would like a hand. Go it alone and it sends you straight to a check of your finished automation, matched against the summary above. Choose the guided path and it walks you through the stages below, one page at a time, confirming each before you move to the next — the very stages laid out here, so you can follow along on the course as well.

  1. Create the automation. Open the Automations editor and add a new one. Name it and leave it there for a moment: the plugin confirms that a fresh automation now exists and remembers it for the checks that follow.

  2. Set the trigger — and guard it. Choose When a row is added, so every line appearing in Line items sets the automation off. Then add two conditions, so it only runs on lines it can actually link: Product reference is not empty and Document reference is not empty. A line missing one of them would send the next actions searching for nothing; the conditions keep that from happening. The plugin checks the trigger and both conditions.

  3. Link the product. Add a first action, Add links. Instead of you picking a record by hand, it searches another table for the one whose column matches a value from your line. Point it at the  Product column: the line’s Product reference should equal a product’s Reference. The plugin checks this first action.

  4. Link the document. Add a second Add links action, built the same way, this time filling the  Document column: the line’s Document reference should equal a document’s Delivery reference. The plugin checks this last action — and your automation is complete.

Your rule is built, but nothing has set it off yet. The plugin takes care of that: ask it to bring in the delivery lines, and it writes them into Line items in front of you — as if your supplier had sent through a tidy list of what was loaded onto the truck.

Watch the  Product and  Document columns as the lines land: neither was part of what the plugin wrote, and both fill themselves in. Your lines are attached to the catalog and to their delivery without a single link entered by hand. The plugin then confirms it on the rows it created.

This is worth pausing on, because the rest of the course leans on it. You did not automate this delivery: you built a rule that holds for every line that will ever enter this table already carrying its references, whoever puts it there. Further along, lines will arrive from a photographed delivery note, then from another piece of software entirely — and this same automation will link them without you touching it again.

One note for later: those lines came to you neatly organized. A real delivery note starts life as a document, not as a ready-made list. Getting from one to the other is a question we come back to a little further along.

Now take it the other way round. In Line items, add a row by hand, then fill in  Product reference with a reference from your catalog and  Document reference with the Delivery reference of the delivery sitting in Documents. Keep an eye on the Product and Document columns: nothing happens.

Your rule is not broken, and you have not missed a step. The event it waits for — a row being added — happened the moment you clicked to create the row, while it was still empty. Your two references arrived afterwards, as modifications, and this rule does not listen for those. The lines the plugin brought in arrived complete, references included, in a single operation: that is the whole difference.

Your rule listens for one event; there is a second one that fits hand entry. Build a second automation on Line items with the trigger When a row is updated, the same two conditions and the same two Add links actions. Since it is so close to the one you already have, the fastest way there is to duplicate that one and change only its trigger: set it to monitor two columns, Product reference and Document reference, and check that your two conditions survived the change of trigger type. Then go back to the row you left stuck: clear one of its two references and type it straight back in. The rule sees the modification, and both links appear.

Two automations for one job may look like one too many, but they answer two different questions: one is set off by data arriving all at once, the other by somebody filling in a field. Both happen in a real base — a script or another piece of software writes a whole row, a colleague fills in a cell — and each needs the event that matches it. The choice of monitored columns is part of the same care: a line item is edited again and again as it is received and validated, and there is nothing to gain from restarting a rule that has nothing left to link.

Delete that row once you have watched it link. It was only ever there to make the point.

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