Automate email digests with 3 new features 🚀

[Jason]

Hey community!

Today we are officially launching several brand new automation features to help you build more robust workflows.

• Automation trigger: at a scheduled time
• Automation action: find records
• Rendering records as a list

One of the best applications for these new features is making an email digest, where you can schedule a time to send a list of records that match the conditions you set. To see how all of these features come together to build an email digest, see this support article.

Below you’ll find a shorter summary of each new feature.

At a scheduled time trigger

The “At a scheduled time” trigger allows you to trigger (or run) an automation at a pre-designated date and time. You can choose to run at regular intervals (in hours or minutes) or at set time on specific days of the week.

Find records action

This action will look for records matching conditions that you can specify within the action settings. If a record that matches the conditions is found, you can add a following action that uses the record data to perform some other action.

Render records as a list

This new feature lets you use the records found in the “find records” trigger and render them as a list within an email. You can select which fields to include, and render them as a list of records in the email.

Share your feedback

Our developers would love to hear your feedback around this feature, so feel free to comment in this topic with any questions or ideas on how we can improve.

[Ahmed_Elagami]

@Jason , Thank You so much for these amazing features, it’s way neat and reliable than Zapier email digest process.

I have one concern though, If I am setting up my trigger to push every day at 10:00 am with the conditional set up to find these records. Sometimes there are no matching records but still, it triggers the email with empty records?
There should be a must-stop to trigger this email if there are no matching records at this day and time
What do you think about that?

Thanks for your time
Ahmed

[Databaser]

Ahmed_Elagami:

There should be a must-stop to trigger this email if there are no matching records at this day and time

• 1! Just emailed support for this. Getting this feedback from multiple customers.

Also: being able to “find records” + update them would be a huge step forwards.

[Justin_Barrett]

Ahmed_Elagami:

There should be a must-stop to trigger this email if there are no matching records at this day and time
What do you think about that?

Back when automations were first introduced last year, there was a teaser comment made by one of the devs on Twitter indicating that conditional logic for automations was also in the works. It would be an easy way to solve your problem, but we’re still waiting for it.

[Tadd_Hunt1]

I love being able to send automated email digests, but please strongly consider implementing the sorting sooner rather than later. :pray:t2:

The purpose of the “grid” is to include multiple records, but without a way to sort the information for the reader, it’s almost useless and doesn’t look professional to them. My grid has appointment dates, but the records and dates are all scattered in a random order which makes readers confused.

[Adrian_Ross]

Thanks for this awesome feature! Unfortunately, using the “Render HTML as Grid” leaves a little bit to be desired since it truncates text & isn’t totally responsive (I’m not sure if that’s possible w/ email anyways, just saying!). That is literally my only complaint about this!

Emailing records with "Render as HTML Grid" - field values are truncated! Automations

Hey all, I’ve run into an interesting problem with AirTable. I have an automation script thats finds all records from today and emails those records with the “Render as HTML Grid” option. Some field values are truncated, and I couldn’t find a way to affect the row size or CSS rules that are causing this to happen. For example: [Screen Shot 2021-04-19 at 1.40.53 PM] For example, there’s a parent <div> that wraps the table enforcing a max-width of 1000px (and overflow-x: auto!) and inside of ea…

[Mariusz_S]

I have a base where sometimes the “find records” action returns no records.
Therefore the email digest automation fails.
As I understand there’s no fallback option at the moment if that happens?

Edit:

Hi @Jason, is there a way you could add a fallback option?
An alternative would be for me to switch off notifications when the automation fails but that’s not an option either :frowning:

[Databaser]

Mariusz_S:

As I understand there’s no fallback option at the moment if that happens?

Nope, unfortunately.

[AlliAlosa]

Loving this new feature, but I’m seeing some really wonky formatting when sending the grid through Airtable’s “Send Email” action.

Anyone else seeing this behavior?

[Alicia_Berg]

Hi! So excited to use this feature!

I am experiencing an issue with some fields not populating. This happened for two different fields I added to the grid. One was a “Record Url” field and the other is a single line field (see picture).

Is anyone else experiencing this? I feel like I am setting up everything right, but I really want to get this cruising for my team…so I’m hoping it’s something I did wrong that I can fix quickly!

Thanks!!

airtable-support-grid-digest|614x500

[Rebecca_Elam]

maybe try a long text field instead of a single line?