Hi everyone,
I’m struggling to find the right way to get this done.
I have a table with emails, a date-time entry (incremental +1 day for each row), a message content part 1 (dynamically generated) + a message part 2 (randomly pull 2 text strings from a database list).
Basically, each day, when the time (now()) is the time of date-time entry column, I want to send a Google Chat DM to that email with content message 1 + 2.
Initially created a button to send dm (that’s what the Google Chat pack offers), but there seems to be no ways to trigger it from a formula that would simply compare current time vs. date-time entry column. The only formula proposed by the pack is findDM(), not useful here. Automations:
time based: don’t seem to trigger the button
row change: only affect editable column (doesn’t work in my case because I need to trigger based on a formula).
Any ideas?
Thanks ahead
Hi @Aymeric_Matencio,
Time-based automations can run max once per hour, if you have the team plan or above. So without getting into building your own pack, you have two options in my opinion:
- If you need ‘minutes’ precission: Build a webhook automation and call it from an external service every minute. Then you can compare
now() against your date-time column and send the message.
Webhook actions are not triggered instantly, it may take a few seconds, so a ‘seconds’ precission is not possible and if you call the webhook let’s say at 11:30:59, it may actually be executed already at minute ‘31’, so better call it only at the beginning of the minute (in this case 11:30:00).
- If ‘hours’ precission is ok: Create a time-based automation to run every hour and compare only the hour of the date-time column against the hour of
now() to decide if the message needs to be sent.
Let me know if this helped!
Pablo
Hi Pablo,
Thanks for your reply.
Yes I have tried the hour precision, but it doesn’t seem to activate the button.
the way I have it setup is that I have a helper column that checks if the time now = date-time entry and outputs TRUE / FALSE. I tested it and it works automatically (at the minute level and the hour level (becomes true when it’s time and back to false when time has passed).
But in the Coda automation time based, no button is triggered (basically I setup the hourly automation and IF the helper column is True, then push the button… when I test it (while there is a TRUE value in that column) nothing happens and the button is not pushed.
Hope that clarifies the situation
Automations don’t run at exact times, that’s why you have to approximate to the hour. Use something like this for your helper column and it should work:
[Datetime column].DateTimeTruncate("Hour")=Now().DateTimeTruncate("Hour")