Cancelling and Updating Google Calendar Events issues

[Alex_Kwong]

Hello Airtable Community:

I need help with my automations. I run a tutoring company and I use Airtable to schedule lessons and events.

I have two automations in my base - "Cancelled Lesson" and "Cancelled Event". These automations update lesson and event status to "Deleted" so I know when to take action when a student or parent changes times/dates of the lessons.

Today I received an email from Airtable stating that I am approaching the limit of my automations, hitting 11,000 runs midway through March! I know this is impossible as I don't have this kind of volume. I look into the Run History and I see that there hundreds of failed runs occuring each day. Clearly this is not correct because parents and tutors only change their schedule once in a while. We may get a handful of changes a day.

I look into the trigger for Google Event "when an event is cancelled" and I see that the triggers are based upon all Status: "cancelled" events as identified in the Google API(?). I find out that automations are run on all prior cancelled events as well as the immediate events. So cumulatively, all the cancelled events in Google Calendar are continuously automated everyday. This is not what I was expecting.

Is there a way to update the Google Calendar Status from "cancelled" to something else once the event has been rescheduled/updated?

Best,

Alex

[Alex_Kwong]

Here's a snapshot of the cancelled Google Event. I believe I need to change the status for previously cancelled events so that the automation doesn't continually run for those events.

[ScottWorld]

Wow, that's strange! You may want to report this as a bug to Airtable at support@airtable.com.

I don't think that people would expect that to run for all previously canceled events on the calendar.

In the meantime, I would recommend shifting all of your Google Calendar automations to Make's Google Calendar automations for Airtable.

Make will only watch for changes that happen from this point forward, but the very cool thing about Make is that you can right-click on the trigger modules to choose any place in time that you want to start. So if you actually wanted to, you could rollback the clock and go back in time. For your needs, you don't want this, but it might be helpful in the future for troubleshooting purposes.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

p.s. I'm the top Airtable & Make expert in the community. If you ever need to hire an expert Airtable consultant, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

[TheTimeSavingCo]

re: I find out that automations are run on all prior cancelled events as well as the immediate events.

Hmm, I wasn't able to replicate this when I tried it.  I created an automation trigger of "When an event is cancelled" with a step of "Create Record" and then I attempted the following:
1. Created an event on Google Calendar then deleted it
  - Automation ran once, created one record
2. Created an event on Google Calendar then deleted it
  - Automation ran once, created one record
3. Created an event on Google Calendar then deleted it
  - Automation ran once, created one record

I'm probably doing something different from you?  I'd love to test it out if you could tell me what the difference is!

[Alex_Kwong]

Hello Adam

I normally create an event in Airtable, then it’ll update Google Calendar. If updates or changes to the event need to be made, I will then delete the event (within Google Calendar), with a trigger that updates the status of the event as “Deleted”.

I will then update the Deleted event to and reclassify this to being set up and re-update the Google calendar with the new dates/times.

[Alex_Kwong]

Also try and wait an hour for the automations to be run again.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Interesting!  So your workflow is:
1. Create event in Airtable
  - "Automation 1" triggers.  This creates a Google Calendar event.  I assume you also save the Google Calendar Event ID with the triggering record at this point?
2. An update / change needs to be made, so you delete the record in Google Calendar
3. Automation with the trigger "When Google Calendar Event canceled" triggers, looks for the correct record in Airtable and updates its status to be "Deleted"
4. In Airtable, you then update the record that was updated from step 3 with new dates / times, and then you trigger "Automation 1" again

Is that right?  And it then creates and saves a new Google Calendar Event ID?

---
re: waiting an hour

Roger that

[Alex_Kwong]

Exactly. I’m not very technical so this probably isn’t the most elegant solution.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Roger that.  I tried testing it with the exact setup and there doesn't appear to be any issues I'm afraid.  I've set it up to also email me whenever the automation with the "Google Event cancelled" trigger runs so I'll be alerted

If you could duplicate your base without any records in it and DM me I'd love to try to see if I could figure something out!

[Alex_Kwong]

Do you know how to toggle the "Status" field within Google Calendar? (See the picture attached). I think this is the flag that Airtable is detecting on all Cancelled events and running the automations on everything that is "Cancelled".