Updating a lookup column through API

**UPPERCASE_Customer_Service** · February 11, 2019, 7:58pm

When using the API to create or update rows, what format should I be using to pass values for a lookup table column? I’ve tried passing the values back as a comma-separated list, and it results in the column appearing to be populated with the correct values, except that each cell has the little red error triangle, with the message that it’s not a valid row reference, even though that value matches the display column. I’ve also tried passing the row IDs, and this didn’t work either. The format I’m using is:

                    {
                        'column': '<Lookup Column Name>',
                        'value': <lookup display value A>,<lookup display value B>
                    },

**oleg** · February 11, 2019, 11:23pm

Hey @UPPERCASE_Customer_Service,

Sorry you’re having troubles with the API. I just tested this scenario and it seems to work correctly. Here are some things to check:

Are you sure you have “Allow Multiple Selections” enabled for the column?
Do you have the right lookup table configured on the column and does the lookup table have the expected display column?

If it helps, here’s my setup:

And here’s the request body:

{
	"rows": [
		{
			"cells": [
				{
					"column": "Name",
					"value": "Fred"
				},
				{
					"column": "Fave color",
					"value": "Red"
				},
				{
					"column": "Fave colors",
					"value": "Red,Blue"
				}
			]
		}
	]
}

As you can see, the row was created successfully. Happy to help troubleshoot this further if you’re not able to address the issue.

**UPPERCASE_Customer_Service** · February 12, 2019, 9:01am

Thanks for this, I’ve mostly got it working. It turns out the problem seems to have been that my lookup display column consists of numbers, and I think the API call that was populating this column was creating them as numbers (even though it’s a text column), and the lookup was attempting to treat the numbers as text strings, and so the lookup was failing because it was trying to match text strings to numbers, even though the contents of both were the same. I put punctuation around both the numbers for both writing them and looking them up, and that seems to have solved it.

**oleg** · February 12, 2019, 10:39pm

I see - lookup columns are always strings in the API, so let me see what we can do on our end to make this easier in the future.

**11154** · March 26, 2019, 6:59pm

Does not work with unicode characters.

**oleg** · March 28, 2019, 1:14am

Realized I never updated this thread – we made changes to our API a few weeks ago to fix these edge cases around working with tables whose display columns have numbers in them.