Action buttons have stopped working

In a document I use every day I’ve mysteriously began experiencing a generic " unexpected error occurred" message when pressing my action button. The action buttons copy all the specified data from one row and past it into a new row in another table, then they delete the original entry leaving the newly pasted copy. Normally I would get the “One row added one row deleted” message, but I just switched to my home office computer and am now getting this error.

Hi @P_C,

If you can share the doc here then we can take a look. If you don’t want to share it publicly here, you can write into Coda Support using the “?” icon at the bottom right corner of the doc and share it there.

There is likely a value in one of your button settings that isn’t resolving and causing the error. I would revisit it and check any values or formulas you have in the button action part.

Same thing here. Suddenly action buttons have stopped working on the mobile platform and return an “Unexpected Error”. Haven’t changed any formulas and the buttons continue to work on the desktop, but not on any of our multiple different mobile devices.

Figured it out. It was trying to copy a value into a column that was calculated by a formula. Not sure why it had worked without issue for a month and then suddenly stopped working yesterday. But it’s fixed.

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Thank you for posting what you found.

It’s difficult to say what change may have affected this, but I’m glad you found the issue.

This was the case for me as well. It must be an update of some sort + caching. If lookup field is being used to generate other fields as well, then you would only copy the lookup field and have the other fields “regenerate” based off of the lookup, rather than trying to have an action formula contribute to them.

Good to know it was a similar situation here.

There was some logic added recently to catch formulas that might have circular references, I’m not sure if it was the culprit here. But yes, in general, it’s best to let the lookup references do the work if you’re loading them in already.

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I’m using a copy of…

and recently had the “Journal+” button start failing. “recently” meaning within the last week… I tried refreshing the page to see if that helped, but no. Wouldn’t expect I’d need to do anything more than that but it’s still happening.

Came across this and would debug, but I can’t afford the time due to current pressures. I was hoping there’s be an easy log to look at, like Automations have (in a way), but found this instead…

https://community.coda.io/t/logging-of-unexpected-errors

I’ll :heart: it over there, but linking it here for relevance to this kind of problem.

I copied that template and the “+ Journal” button simply adds a new row to a table and shows that row’s popup view. The copy I tried worked and has this formula:

Activate(AddRow(Journal))

Experienced the same. I often forget to update my actions after turning some column somewhere into a formula.

It’s a good change though. Better have the formula fail rather than silently perform a partial update (i.e. a thing I might have not expected it to do).

P.S. Would’ve been even better if the error actually called that out, the exact reason of failure.

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Just to be certain, the instance of that button I’m referring to is the one inside a Calendar entry. The same button on the Journal page works.

Also, this worked when I originally started using a copy of this doc. The only change I’ve made is adding an additional column to the Actions table.

Thanks for looking!

Thank you for clarifying which button. The one within the calendar table is more complex, but it’s working for me in the doc copy. It’s showing this for the formula…

Activate(
If(
  Journal.[Event ID].Contains(thisRow.[Event ID]),
  Journal.Filter([Event ID]==thisRow.[Event ID]),
  Journal.
    AddRow(
      Journal.Title,thisRow.Event.Summary,
      Journal.[Event ID], thisRow.[Event ID],
      Journal.When,thisRow.Start,
      Journal.Notes, Concatenate("Location: ", thisRow.Location,"  ", thisRow.[Hangout Link], "

",thisRow.Description)
    )
)
)

If you want to contact support so you can share the doc instead of sharing it publicly here, they might be able see what the specific issue is there. As far as I can tell from the copy of the template though, it appears to be working.