An attachment url is disallowed

[Andreanne_St-Ge]

Hi there!

I need to send calendar invites by email automation to people I book for events. I'm using Make to create the calendar invite and upload it as a file in Airtable.

Then, I'm using automations to send the .ics file as an email attachment to people I book for my events. They can then download it from their email and it creates a calendar invite for them. Everything seem to work just fine when I test things.

However, I have two types of emails to send via automations : 

• Initial invitation when I'm booking someone to an event :
  • Triggered when the entry matches conditions
  • Sends email with .ics attachment
  • This one doesn't work and the error is 'An attachment url is disallowed'

• Updates (for when something changes such as the event duration) : 
  • Triggered when the entry is updated
  • Sends emails with .ics attachment
  • Works fine!

Any idea why my initial email won't send? My guess is that it's because the trigger is too fast and the file hasn't completely uploaded to Airtable so the automation still thinks it's a link instead of a file. I have no idea how to correct this though.

Thanks a lot !

[DisraeliGears01]

Cool use of the .ics building concept!

I agree the problem is likely the turnaround on attaching the file from Make. What are the conditions active on the initial invite automation? Because the very first thing that comes to mind is to predicate the initial invite trigger on the attachment field, either "is not empty" or "contains .ics".  

If you've already tried that, there may be a formula scheme you could come up with that takes the created time, adds time via a duration field, and is then triggered on the formula field time? I'd have to think more on that one...

[Andreanne_St-Ge]

Hey! 🙂 Thanks for the reply! I already tried to use both "not empty" and contains ".ics" as conditions, but it's unfortunately not working. I've also tried adding a step between my trigger and the email being sent, but I've been unsuccessful so far. But I think you might be onto something with your formula. I'll try to come up with something and will update if I find a way to make this work.

If anyone thinks about something else, please let me know! 🙂 

Thanks!

[TheTimeSavingCo · Accepted solution]

That formula field sounds good.  You could also try adding a "Run a script" action that adds a delay to your automation?  Here's a thread about it:
https://community.airtable.com/t5/development-apis/how-to-add-delay-as-an-action-in-airtable-automat...

Do note the thing@kuovonne  mentions about potentially needing to do a "Find Record" action to grab the record again so that your automation has the latest data!

[Andreanne_St-Ge]

Hey! Thank you so much!

This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for and it works like a charm!