frankly, I’m terrified to do this. It’s impossible for me to discern in advance if doing this will delete the softr user accounts created and resultingly delete the associated records I need to preserve. And regardless of if it does somehow work smoothly (delete only softr accounts, leave the records alone), it still won’t undo the 2-way sync, so I’d be in the same boat as soon as the sync kicks back in.
This is all my rough understanding since it’s so vaguely documented. I mean, it SAYS I can’t undo it so as far as I can guess, that’s the reality of what would happen.
Marine has given me a solution that sounds promising that I am going to first test in a dummy base before pulling the trigger on. I will update on results after I confirm that I didn’t wreck anything further LOL.
The Plan:
- Duplicate my email field.
- Disconnect my airtable staff connection from the user app.
- In the new duplicated field, leave all emails as they were. In the “live” field, I will be deleting all email addresses for records with an empty “last seen” field (this is my best way to know that if they were never ‘seen’ it probably was an account generated in error when I enabled the 2-way sync)
- in the softr User Accounts panel, delete all accounts with empy “last seen” fields
- Re-map my airtable staff table sync with the user accounts. Pray that Softr’s User Account fields sync with my intended records that should have accounts (without creating duplicate accounts in softr or duplicate records in my staff table)
Moving forward I am trying to develop a method for staff to be able to generate an account for records that already exist in our staff table by using an automation that once they review the email and swear on their mother’s life that it is 100% CORRECT, it will trigger an automation to first copy the “dummy” email field value (what I will be creating when I duplicate my email field) into the “live email” field.
I’m going to create a “softr account status” single select that is defaulted to “no account” and updates to “account requested” once a staff member confirms the record’s email is correct. The updated status will trigger the live email field to populate in airtable.
From there, I expect the softr sync to do it’s annoying thing and automatically create the new account. I think I’ll have an automation that fires once the account creation date field is populated that will send an api call to softr to generate a magic link, as well as updating their softr account status field to “magic link generated”.
Ill create the next automation to run when the magic link field if the records account status is “magic link generated”. When triggered, it’ll fire an email to the user with the magic link, and update their status to “account created”
I’ll configure a user group based off of the “account created” status to redirect the staff based off that group to a password reset page so they can create their password. I havent tested this yet but my hope is that by accessing this link, it will populate the “last seen” field for the first time. My intent is to use that field to create a conditional automation to run if status is “account created” and last seen field is updated to then run the automation to update status to “sign in successful” (mostly so I can generate new magic links in the future without reverting the user to be in a group that always redirects to password reset page)
WHEW that was a lot but good to get my plan sorted. Does this sound excessively dumb, anyone who is more experienced than myself? Overkill? easier methods? I’m open to the collective wisdom of the community LOL. But I’ll test it in my playground first.
