Notify myself when a row is added to a table

[James_Bloemendal]

Hey Coda Users, I’m looking for a way to notify myself and two other users every time a row is added to a table. What’s the simplest way to do this?

The specific use case in an idea backlog for the sales team, and we want Product to be notified.

Thanks!

[Daniel_Stieber]

Hey @James_Bloemendal
if anyone can add rows in multiple ways (like clicking the plus button on the table), I’d say automations is your way to go.

Since there is no “Row added” trigger, you might want to mark, which rows are old and which are new:

Everytime a row is changed or added, the automation should check if it has already notified you. If not, it sends out the notification and then marks the rows as notified.

You can do it like this:

• Create a new colum “Is Notified?” in your table
• Create a new automation and select “Row changed” in the “When” section and select your table
• Add an IF condition with [Step 1 Result].[Is Notified?]=false to only get notified when the row is new
• Now create two “Then” steps:
• Send notifications with your message to the people who should get notified
• Modify rows and select the table and again “Step 1 Result” and update the “Is Notified?” to true.

Note that the notification automation sometimes takes a couple of seconds until it fires.

Important though: Depending on your plan, and how often you want to get notified, it might make sense to go for time based instead of row change-based! The Free and the Pro plan have only limted numbers of automations that can run per month. With time based you could e.g. limit it to once per day with e.g. “There are 5 new rows”

[Daniel_Stieber]

Other thoughts:

• If you have a workflow where users create the rows with a button, you can add an additional action to the button with the runactions() formula. That way you can create the row AND send out notifications at once.

• If you want to let people fill the ideas out before the notification goes out, you might want to make a “notify product” button per row. So user creates row, fills it out and then says “I’m done, chekt it out”

I personally use a solution like in my first answer in a doc, but time based once a day, as I don’t need it immediately and I can be sure the rows is filled out completely.

[James_Bloemendal]

Thanks @Daniel_Stieber this is exactly what I was looking for. I had not used the value for new rows yet, but this was very convenient. Thanks again!