Issue with Importing Option Fields in Lookup Creation | Clay

Issue with Importing Option Fields in Lookup Creation

Pretty sure this isn’t expected behaviour: Creating a lookup, importing rows from another table. Text fields are imported correctly, but for option fields (which I love to use to validate data instead of free text, e.g. gender (male/female)), I’m only getting the optionId. is this supposed to be like that? and if so, what’s the workaround?

5 comments

Channeled
APP
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This behavior is expected when using the Lookup feature. When importing option fields from another table, Clay imports the raw data values (optionIds) rather than the display values. This is similar to how object fields appear in CSV exports - they don't display the formatted values but rather the underlying data. For option/select fields specifically, Clay stores these as predefined tags with associated IDs in the background. As a workaround, you could create a formula column in your source table that converts the option IDs to their display values before using the lookup.
Sources: Table columns | Documentation | Clay University Lookup Rows | Documentation | Clay University Download as a CSV [Clay 101] - Clay University
Daniel S.
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just wondering: am i the only one who thinks this is cumbersome and not ideal?
Daniel S.
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yes pls
Owen C.
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Hey Daniel, thanks for reaching out! Agreed with you on this! Bumping our team to see if they're working on a better solution. The workaround here is to associated a specific ID to the value and have a formula return the correct value. I.e if the data looks like: optid = 123 = "cat" optd = 456 = "dog" Type into the formula generator: If {{optid}} equals 123, return cat, else return dog This example only uses two option id's if there are more the logic of the formula changes slightly but follows the same concept.
Channeled
APP
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