Level two course - Workflow 1: Merging data

[Olic]

Describe the problem

After merging data from Airtable and Countries API by country name, directly updating the Airtable data table kept failing, which took me a lot of time… Finally, I had to use the EditField node as a workaround, and everything worked as expected. I really want to know what caused the problem? In the workflow, the upper branch runs successfully, and the lower branch fails.

What is the error message?

{
  "errorMessage": "Your request is invalid or could not be processed by the service [item 0]",
  "errorDescription": "Unknown field name: \"id\"",
  "errorDetails": {
    "rawErrorMessage": [
      "422 - {\"error\":{\"type\":\"UNKNOWN_FIELD_NAME\",\"message\":\"Unknown field name: \\\"id\\\"\"}}"
    ],
    "httpCode": "422"
  },
  "n8nDetails": {
    "nodeName": "Airtable2",
    "nodeType": "n8n-nodes-base.airtable",
    "nodeVersion": 2.1,
    "resource": "record",
    "operation": "update",
    "itemIndex": 0,
    "time": "2025/3/31 19:09:15",
    "n8nVersion": "1.84.1 (Self Hosted)",
    "binaryDataMode": "default",
    "stackTrace": [
      "NodeApiError: Your request is invalid or could not be processed by the service",
      "    at ExecuteContext.requestWithAuthentication (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-core/src/execution-engine/node-execution-context/utils/request-helper-functions.ts:1421:10)",
      "    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:95:5)",
      "    at ExecuteContext.requestWithAuthentication (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-core/src/execution-engine/node-execution-context/utils/request-helper-functions.ts:1707:11)",
      "    at ExecuteContext.apiRequest (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-nodes-base/nodes/Airtable/v2/transport/index.ts:51:9)",
      "    at ExecuteContext.batchUpdate (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-nodes-base/nodes/Airtable/v2/transport/index.ts:150:18)",
      "    at ExecuteContext.execute (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-nodes-base/nodes/Airtable/v2/actions/record/update.operation.ts:132:25)",
      "    at ExecuteContext.router (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-nodes-base/nodes/Airtable/v2/actions/router.ts:32:18)",
      "    at ExecuteContext.execute (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-nodes-base/nodes/Airtable/v2/AirtableV2.node.ts:30:10)",
      "    at WorkflowExecute.runNode (/Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-core/src/execution-engine/workflow-execute.ts:1155:9)",
      "    at /Users/olicawa/.npm/_npx/a8a7eec953f1f314/node_modules/n8n-core/src/execution-engine/workflow-execute.ts:1505:27"
    ]
  }
} 

Please share your workflow

Share the output returned by the last node

Information on your n8n setup

• n8n version: 1.84.1
• Database (default: SQLite): default
• n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main): default
• Running n8n via npm
• Operating system: macOS

[Olek]

The error says, essentially, that the target table doesn’t have a field named id.
Try adding it to the ignore fields list.

If this resolves your issue, please mark this post as a Solution.

[Olic]

@Olek

Try adding it to the ignore fields list.

Great! Thank you for guiding me with this revelation about putting the ‘id’ into the ignore fields list. I re-examined the “output data form” option of my previous Merge node and set it to “input 1”. This made the merge node onlyadditionally output two system fields “id” and “createTime”. Therefore, I only need to ignore “id” and “createTime” in the airTable2 node to make the node execute correctly.