Thank you, Chayce. That may be all I need. I will try to explain in more detail just in case.
Emails for purchases are captured in a connected table. Another table is used to capture specific details from each purchase email. Names for the purchase are included. So, person A makes a purchase > email is captured > a pipeline creates a record with the desired details from the email.
Person A makes another purchase. Rather than create a whole new record, I want to update the previously created record for person A with the additional names and an increment of the number of items. The names may or may not be given but, if they are, concatenate the 2nd purchase names with the first purchase names.
Does that make sense?
Sure, makes sense. Have you thought about just trying a relationship and using summary fields? If you're able to match the email to the PO, instead of incrementing / updating the fields, you could consider just having the Pipeline fill out the 'Related PO' and then use the native summary fields to summarize the # or orders, qty or whatever, and then also use the summary combined text as well for text values.
The pipeline will work but using the relationship will help backfill for older emails/POs and be a little more error proof since the relationship can be adapted/changed on the fly instead of using scalar data.
I didn't realize I could concatenate text with a summary field. I will look into that. No to back fill records at this point but still good to consider the relationship approach.
Yep - there is a combined text summary field that allows you to summarize text fields from your child table - works great for a situation like you've outlined.
