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Automations broken?

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  • Anthony11
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  • 11 replies
  • September 25, 2020
Justin_Barrett wrote:

How quickly are you testing #2 after #1? Say you choose the “Timer” option in that single-select, which triggers the first automation. You wait a bit, then clear the field, which triggers the second one. How much of a time gap is in-between those two actions? I’m asking because there’s a delay of several seconds before Airtable actually begins running any automation after its trigger event has occurred. It’s possible that you’re triggering #2 too quickly, before #1 has had a chance to run and put that record ID into the relevant field.


Thanks Justin, I appreciate your help and it is a good point. But I am waiting after Automation 1 until I can see the record created and fields updated in the jobs table. Then I count to 3. Then I trigger Automation 2 and it doesn’t work.

It got me thinking though - should the trigger for Automation 2 be:
When “status” is none of “timer” [rather than is not]
Perhaps it was a sort of mouse click up or down problem which interferred with the timing of the status change field? But this turned out not to be an issue.

The key thing is that the automation does work when I copy and paste the record ID into the Automation action (see picture). It is just when I use the Automation action to pull the Record ID value from a field in my table it doesn’t seem to recognise it - despite it being the same value that I have just copied and pasted.

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Justin_Barrett
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Anthony11 wrote:

Thanks Justin, I appreciate your help and it is a good point. But I am waiting after Automation 1 until I can see the record created and fields updated in the jobs table. Then I count to 3. Then I trigger Automation 2 and it doesn’t work.

It got me thinking though - should the trigger for Automation 2 be:
When “status” is none of “timer” [rather than is not]
Perhaps it was a sort of mouse click up or down problem which interferred with the timing of the status change field? But this turned out not to be an issue.

The key thing is that the automation does work when I copy and paste the record ID into the Automation action (see picture). It is just when I use the Automation action to pull the Record ID value from a field in my table it doesn’t seem to recognise it - despite it being the same value that I have just copied and pasted.

==================


That shouldn’t make a difference. The end result is the same. I don’t think the trigger is the issue. I think it’s somewhere else, but I’m still only seeing fragments of your setup. However, this latest fragment shows something that wasn’t evident before: the {Timesheet record ID passthru} field that you’re trying to pull from is a formula. What exactly is that formula? That may provide another clue.

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  • Anthony11
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  • 11 replies
  • September 29, 2020
Justin_Barrett wrote:

That shouldn’t make a difference. The end result is the same. I don’t think the trigger is the issue. I think it’s somewhere else, but I’m still only seeing fragments of your setup. However, this latest fragment shows something that wasn’t evident before: the {Timesheet record ID passthru} field that you’re trying to pull from is a formula. What exactly is that formula? That may provide another clue.


Thanks for your persistence Justin! I don’t think this is the issue, at least not directly:

I tried different ways of getting the timesheet record ID into the automation given this appears to be the broken bit, the different snips showed the different methods I tried.

One was just using the Timesheet Record ID straight from the relevant field (didn’t work). The second was using another field which manipulated the Timesheet Record ID (ie in case there was a problem recognising as a string, I tried different formulas so that it might get recognised as a string) (didn’t work). The third (testing method) was just pasting the relevant Timesheet Record ID straight into the Automation Action (did work, but clearly not now automatic!). But we can see from these three tests there is some issue with the Automation Action picking up the Timesheet Record ID.

Justin_Barrett
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Anthony11 wrote:

Thanks for your persistence Justin! I don’t think this is the issue, at least not directly:

I tried different ways of getting the timesheet record ID into the automation given this appears to be the broken bit, the different snips showed the different methods I tried.

One was just using the Timesheet Record ID straight from the relevant field (didn’t work). The second was using another field which manipulated the Timesheet Record ID (ie in case there was a problem recognising as a string, I tried different formulas so that it might get recognised as a string) (didn’t work). The third (testing method) was just pasting the relevant Timesheet Record ID straight into the Automation Action (did work, but clearly not now automatic!). But we can see from these three tests there is some issue with the Automation Action picking up the Timesheet Record ID.


Would you be able to share your base? You could make a copy with any sensitive data stripped out if you’re more comfortable with that. After all that we’ve tried so far, I want to run more hands-on tests.

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  • Anthony11
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  • 11 replies
  • September 29, 2020
Justin_Barrett wrote:

Would you be able to share your base? You could make a copy with any sensitive data stripped out if you’re more comfortable with that. After all that we’ve tried so far, I want to run more hands-on tests.


First of all thanks for everyone who took the time to consider my problem and especially to Justin for perservering.

When I created a fresh base, reproducing the essential structure and automations… it worked!

I tried cross referencing the base that didn’t work and everything looked identical. I then deleted both automations from the initial base and re-wrote them, and it worked here too! The solution was probably rewriting the first automation that recorded the Record ID of the timesheet record in the Jobs table for later re-use, as I had deleted and rewritten the second one many times.

If I was reading this I would assume that I just made a silly mistake that I still haven’t spotted. But as I am writing this I am going to insist that there was some “background” bug that created the issue on inital deployment :slightly_smiling_face:

Anyway you can have a look at what I was doing here in case you are curious: https://airtable.com/invite/l?inviteId=invX5t40GDxg1PwzM&inviteToken=7519927d08db12653f009c1a3007cd920ce822960fdec8a5b98655e6cbade485

Justin_Barrett
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  • Justin_Barrett
    Justin_Barrett
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  • Anthony11
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  • 11 replies
  • October 9, 2020
Anthony11 wrote:

First of all thanks for everyone who took the time to consider my problem and especially to Justin for perservering.

When I created a fresh base, reproducing the essential structure and automations… it worked!

I tried cross referencing the base that didn’t work and everything looked identical. I then deleted both automations from the initial base and re-wrote them, and it worked here too! The solution was probably rewriting the first automation that recorded the Record ID of the timesheet record in the Jobs table for later re-use, as I had deleted and rewritten the second one many times.

If I was reading this I would assume that I just made a silly mistake that I still haven’t spotted. But as I am writing this I am going to insist that there was some “background” bug that created the issue on inital deployment :slightly_smiling_face:

Anyway you can have a look at what I was doing here in case you are curious: https://airtable.com/invite/l?inviteId=invX5t40GDxg1PwzM&inviteToken=7519927d08db12653f009c1a3007cd920ce822960fdec8a5b98655e6cbade485


A final update for those interested…! After using for a while I have seen that this automation does randomly fail reasonably frequently. Failure seems to be correlated with situations in which there is more “going on”. Ie lots of records or moving things between categories a lot. Therefore I wouldn’t rely on this method as a robust solution at the moment, possibly automations need a bit more time to mature.

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kuovonne
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    Asher_Weinstein
  • kuovonne
    kuovonne
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Jeremy_Oglesby wrote:

I think it might just be an issue with the lookup fields - they don’t seem to play nicely with automations when trying to retrieve values out of them.

Try making formula fields that just point at your lookup fields (pulls the values from the lookup fields), and use those in your automations instead.


Okay! This seems to be a similar problem that I am having also.

Problem: Failed to construct the value for “Message”. ==> The trigger WORKS, the action of writing the email is not working, therefore the ACTION does not fire.

Process:

  1. User fills in the form
  2. User gets an automatic confirmation email upon submitting the form (the body of the email includes the details of the form) - email body incorporates responses and some responses are selections (ie, links to another tab).

Basically, I have a form that incorporates a linked function from another tab in my database, as a selection for the user. The idea is to give the client a range of options to choose from BUT these are not lookup functions, they are LINKED TO ANOTHER TAB.

Could this be the reason for my issue?

PS: I have no lookup functions in the data collection process (the form that is filled in)

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