Problem with the Assignee field on Airtable

[Adrien_Ritouet]

Hello everyone, I’m building an agent on n8n, to update tasks automatically in an Airtable table, for each task in the table, there is a user field that associates the task with the designated person. However, I have a bug when my agent uses the “Create a record” tool, which tells me that he has a problem with the values I specify for the User field (see image 1), however, I check the “Get Tasks” tool of my agent that allows to retrieve the tasks already present in my table and the user field corresponds well to what I have filled (see image 2). Has anyone ever encountered this problem ?

[n8n]

It looks like your topic is missing some important information. Could you provide the following if applicable.

• n8n version:
• Database (default: SQLite):
• n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
• Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
• Operating system:

[hrishikesh]

I tried to read your post multiple times, but I’m still not completely sure I understand the issue, apologies if it’s just me. The part that I don’t understand is:

@Adrien_Ritouet

However, I have a bug when my agent uses the “Create a record” tool, which tells me that he has a problem with the values I specify for the User field (see image 1)

It’s not clear to me, what the bug is. Maybe you could try rephrasing the issue?

[Exnav29]

Hey Adrien,

It looks like Airtable is rejecting the value you’re passing for the User field this is usually due to one of these reasons:

Possible Fixes
Ensure You’re Passing the Correct Format

• Airtable User fields expect a specific format (e.g., an email or record ID, not just a name).
• Check if the “Get Tasks” output returns a User ID or email.
• If it’s an object, try extracting just the id or email using an Expression in the “Create Record” node:

{{$json["user"]["id"]}}  // If it requires an ID
{{$json["user"]["email"]}}  // If it requires an email

Double-Check Airtable Field Type
Go to Airtable → Table Settings and verify the “User” field type.
If it’s a collaborator field, ensure you’re passing an email, not just a name.
If it’s a linked record, you must pass a record ID, not a text value.


Try Manually Entering a Value in n8n
In the “Create Record” node, manually enter a known valid user ID/email to see if it works.
If manual input works, then the issue is with how n8n is fetching the data.

[Ventsislav_Minev]

@Adrien_Ritouet

update tasks automatically in an Airtable table, for each task in the table, there is a user field that associates the task with the designated person. However, I have a bug when my agent uses the “Create a record” tool, which tells me that he has a problem with the values I specify for the User field (see image 1), however, I check the “Get Tasks” tool of my agent that allows to retrieve the tasks already present in my table and the user field corresponds well to what I have filled (see image 2). Has anyone ever encountered this problem ?

In my experience Letting LLMs ‘look up the existing records’ with an arbitrary query to a system should be used only as an error handling mechanism. Most of the times it enters in a loop and prompts the LLM over and over again tens even hundreds of times and this is on a small bases and tables. On tables with a lot of data it can get stuck for minutes and consume a lot of credits super easily so use it with caution.