Trigger an automation from formula

Showcase Tips and Hacks
1

I received a question about how to trigger an automation from a formula recently, and with the help of @Adam_Ginzberg came up with a solution. This is just a workaround for now, and we plan on making this easier to use in the future.

In the doc below, Calculated Column outputs “Greater than 8” if the sum of Input 1 and Input 2 is greater than 8 (outputs “Less than 8” if the sum is less than 8). If we wanted to trigger an e-mail notification when the Calculated Column is “Greater than 8,” we couldn’t do that with an automation since row-change automations do not detect changes in formulas. Instead, we create a Calculated Column Cache that contains the hard-coded value from Calculated Column and the automation changes the Calculated Column Cache column to the value in Calculated Column when the two values do not equal each other. You could string on more conditions in the Automation to check if the “cache” column equals a certain value so that the e-mail notification only runs under certain conditions.

4 Likes
2

That’s really helpful. Thank you.

3

@Al_Chen_Coda How would you structure the automation? Is it webhook, row-changed, or timebased?

1 Like
4

@Joe_Kattan Row-change. If you copy the doc I embedded earlier in the thread, you can see how I set up the automation for this example use case.

5

hello don’t really understand how you proceed to get the cache column
thanks

6

Did you copy the doc and had a look at the automation?

The fourth step is broken when copied due to what I presume was a hard-coded user, you can change it to this for testing purposes: Notify(User(), "automation has run")

image
image597×1171 48.1 KB

7

Thanks for the heads up! Just changed that 4th step to a formula to notify the current User().

2 Likes