Feature request
I’d like to propose a ‘continueIf’ feature that would allow the ‘push all buttons’ action in Coda to continue processing remaining buttons even when it encounters an error. Bonus points if there’s an optional way to output errors into certain columns or somehow highlight the problematic rows.
This would improve the reliability of our workflows/automations in Coda.
Background
We have several workflows across our Coda documents that rely on the the ‘push all buttons’ feature or use a forEach loop to update data in a row. For ease, I’ll focus on the ‘push all buttons’ scenario because that’s the most commonly used pattern within my team.
Our common issue is that the workflows or automations fail because Coda stops completely when it encounters its first error, rather than continuing to process the remaining buttons in the sequence.
I understand that the appropriate mitigation for this is to do the filtering at the button level - in the table that holds the buttons, specifically using the Disable If
criteria to turn off / disable the buttons you don’t want pressed.
However, that approach only works if you’re relatively certain about what errors you’ll face and can predict the conditions that would make certain actions invalid. For more complex scenarios or edge cases that may not be apparent until runtime, and then you’re stuck troubleshooting the problem and adding more Disable If
criteria manually.
The result is that using automations to push buttons becomes unreliable and at times disruptive. It’s the edge cases that tend to get us more than anything else, one or two invalid rows can halt an entire workflow that would otherwise successfully process thousands of records.