Upcoming product changes

[jcadence]

UPDATE: There have been a handful of posts with different dates. The official date of change is May 10th. We have posted additional details in this thread

Hi everyone!

With the upcoming general availability launch of AppSheet Automation we wanted to provide additional information on what will be taking place within the editor and product. Before we do, we want to say a big THANK YOU to each and everyone of you that has participated in our preview and testing phases. The feedback you’ve provided will continue to help improve the product and its functionality over time. We won’t have everything addressed at the time of GA, but we will continue to work to improve.

Here’s a few key changes you’ll start to notice over the coming weeks:

The bots associated with AppSheet Automation are the new way of configuring workflow rules/reports with events and processes. Moving forward, use bots for new workflows/automations. You will still be able to modify existing workflow rules / reports for several weeks. We will post a modification announcement once this ability changes. During this time, in phases, your workflows rules/reports will be automatically migrated to bots. There is no additional work required from your end on the migration.

Our goal is to provide richer capabilities through a super-set of workflow rules and reports to help save each of you time in your application and automation development process. Please continue to provide feedback in posts on the community, this thread, or in a direct message to myself or the team.

Thank you again for being part of our journey. We couldn’t do this without you.

Kindly,
The AppSheet team

[Former Community Member]

Thanks all for your patience, as mentioned we are allowing customers couple more weeks to continue creating new workflows/report.

I am including couple of quick samples that may be helpful:

1. Have a workflow rule, create a similar bot - This video walks you through doing a point by point comparison between a workflow rule and a bot
2. Intelligent Bot Creation - This video walks you through how AppSheet uses AI to capture user intent and help create bots within a few clicks, making you more productive.

Please continue to post your comments here.

[Ferret]

For actions, the action type aka “Do This” setting of “Grouped: Execute a Process” that was added when Automation hit Preview is no longer available.

Why is this? I felt as if calling a process directly from a manually invoked action was a good way to bypass the complexity of setting up a workflow trigger text column and populating/clearing the field just to trigger a bot that watches on all changes and runs a conditional every time that rarely will be true.
Instead, an action-called process will only trigger automation when needed. I went to use this action type today after the abrupt discontinuation of new workflows and was disappointed to see this removal.

[Former Community Member]

@Ferret we felt that the current design of invoking a process directly as an action needs some more work hence made the decision to introduce it post GA. We will keep you folks posted as soon as its available @Dan_Bahir FYI

[Former Community Member]

We will be migrating all your existing workflow rules / reports to bots in the following weeks. The please see the help article for additional information.

[YGY]

Thanks for the presentation. I just used Automation for the first time and managed to create a Bot that solved a problem I’ve been tackling for a couple of days. I did find it a little hard to keep track of the relationships between the four “elements”, but I think it will take a few more tries to start getting used to it.

These helped:

[Tiger1]

So i created an email bot. But I never saw where I could “test” it. The older version - i could test these before deploying it. Am I missing something?

[Mike_A]

@Tiger - not sure what you see. For testing, I see the following button on the Bot…

[Tiger1]

Ok. I don’t have that. Well I never saw it. Thanks.

[Former Community Member]

Are you able to see it now?

[Jamie]

I just uncovered what appears to be a major issue with using “legacy” workflow email body templates after the switch to Bots (and I guess the subsequent removal / return of access to workflows): workflows can no longer create new body templates. When trying to do so it puts the automation process:task name into the path & filename and it never creates the document file:

Notice the colon in the path - this is not a valid path & filename and will not work (at least with OneDrive). So, after reviewing this thread I decided to go ahead and try creating the template using Bots/Tasks and that worked!

Very happy to have a fix, but kinda shocked that this was not tested more carefully. I know Google’s mantra is to “move fast and break things” but I think perhaps moving a little TOO fast?

Update: I did create the new workflow by copying an existing one - perhaps that’s the root of the problem? I haven’t tried creating from scratch…

[Steve]

Jamie:

I know Google’s mantra is to “move fast and break things”

Actually, I believe that’s Facebook’s.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Bit of doubt… to your opinion!

[Steve]

https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/facebook-philosophy-move-fast-and-break-things

[Jamie]

Ugh - I stand corrected . I guess Google was “Don’t be Evil”? Anyway, “fail fast” or whatever the case may be - something got broken very recently.

[Steve]

en.wikipedia.org

Don't be evil

"Don't be evil" is a phrase used in Google's corporate code of conduct, which it also formerly preceded as a motto. Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct. The original motto was retained in Google's code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in...

[Jamie]

OK, well, I wouldn’t go nearly so far as to say evil, but perhaps devious? Cunning? Due to the issue that was introduced with creating new legacy workflow email templates I was forced to spend most of my day digging into the Automation feature and, whether intentional or not, you got me AppSheet. I am smitten. Of course the last thing I really “want” to do is rework all of my email workflows but the gears in my head are definitely turning and I can see some huge upsides to doing just that. Software is never done so I guess since you all are endlessly working on the software that makes our software that fact is compounded.

[Jordan_Davis1]

What would be really satisfying for my brain is if there was a clear distinction made between what this is replacing, what it’s preserving, and what it’s adding. For example, what is a common set of processes that this new system make’s easier than the old system.

Each month I have to send reports to certain colleagues, based on their data entry in a table. With workflows, I can’t iterate through that list and use the same template for all of them. Would that type of iteration be possible with bots? i.e.

def bot_life(table):
for name in table:
create new report for each unique name
send each as an attachment to name@email.com
return a lot more space that used to be taken up by duplicative workflows

[Former Community Member]

@Jordan_Davis1 automation is a superset of the existing workflow rules/reports capabilities, in that sense it preserves all the existing capabilities and adds some new ones, some of them listed here:

• Grammar extensions - You have conditional branches, wait (for a condition) and call process steps that weren’t possible before
• Modularity - All components within a bot are modular & reusable. That means any task that you create can be reused in multiple processes, processes can be reused in multiple bots and so on.
• External data change events - Automation supports running bots based on data changes made manually to a data source (eg: updating a sheet) in addition to reacting to changed made through an app.

Yes you can address your use case with a bot (scheduled event, send an email task (with attachments))

[Austin]

Jordan_Davis1:

For example, what is a common set of processes that this new system make’s easier than the old system.

It would be easier to give examples where the new system is not easier than the old system.

[Jordan_Davis1]

burn

[Jamie]

It definitely takes some getting used to, and there are some issues that need to get worked out (for example, searching in the Tasks tab does nothing) but I think this little diagram misses one huge benefit which is what ultimately made me a convert: not only can you have conditions in the Event but you can have multiple branching conditions in the Process as well!

This simple fact allows a level of reusability and true workflow logic that just wasn’t possible before. After figuring this out, I was able to produce this branching process in all of 20 minutes:

[Austin]

The image in the automation tab has the branching in processes in it.
I think the image in the behavior tab is meant to show more how similar they are to make a user not be afraid to switch over to bots.

[Jamie]

Interesting - not there for me. Maybe because I have already created a Bot? However, I can get to that graphic if I click the help icon. Anyway, good stuff!

[jcadence]

Providing an update for those on this thread- 4/28 is the cut off to create new workflows. After that date, Bots will be how new automations are created. Existing workflows will still be accessible, this only applies to net new.

For those looking to speed up their learning journey, here are a few additional resources:

Automation Office Hours (1 hour)

Getting started video (7 mins)

Please continue to reach out should you have questions.

[Martina_Hawkins]

JCadence:

Existing workflows will still be accessible, this only applies to net new.

Existing workflows will still be accessible, this only applies to net new.
Does this mean we can still edit and change existing Workflows after 28th April or do we have to change them to Bots if we need to make any changes?
Given all the issues and many sugesstions for improvements in this forum is this date still THE Date for cutoff? Why such a hurry? Why not sort out the issues and suggesstions first and give us all more time?
@JCadence

[Former Community Member]

@Martina yes you will still be able to modify and change existing workflows after 28th and don’t have to change them to bots (we will be auto-migrating them for you – an community post regarding that will be out shortly). Bots are the new way of building workflow rules / reports. Please continue providing feedback.

[Former Community Member]

@Martina wanted to make sure you saw the latest announcement that we posted regarding this IMPORTANT: You won't be able to create new Workflow rules / reports starting 5/10/2021 - #2 by Kambw...

[Martina_Hawkins]

Thanks @prithpal, I have read the post. I assume that is 10th May 2021, not 5th Oct (UK Date format User)

[Former Community Member]

Correct - its May 10, 2021. I will update the post/help article to reflect that so its not ambiguous.

[Lucinda_Mason]

Just now watched both of these videos. They were both helpful. In the second video, I know it was just to show examples but couldn’t he have used more realistic data? He changed the due date and that event alone set it to “in process”. Even if he set the due date to a date BEFORE the current date. To me that would’ve set a Late value not an in process.

I did learn from this but just as when I first started with AppSheet it bothered me to see example apps that were not following solid data design rules. If the field had been named Date Started, it would make more sense. Plus, a future date wouldn’t be allowed.

[jcadence]

Just confirming Prithpal’s comment - May 10th is the cutoff date to create new workflows. This has been updated in the initial announcement.

[Martina_Hawkins]

@JCadence the initial announcement still says May 10th not May 19th that you have just posted.

[jcadence]

Thanks @Martina Typed it too quickly

[rotomaxprinting]

I have 6 PDF generators (Quotation generation, report generations, Job Card generators). All these gets triggered, when I do an action to

1. “change related date value columns in related table”.
2. and updating a counter column
   “Some workflow needs to check for value updating in both date and counter columns.”

Please let me know WHETHER I NEED TO ACTION ON MY EXISTING WORKFLOWS?

Note: I am in the middle of creating other Apps and bug fixing the existing tools. I really didn’t expect that the migration would come this quickly deprecating the old one. WITH FULL TRUST ON APPSHEET, WE STOPPED OUR PREVIOUS SOFTWARE COMPLETELY RECENTLY.

• Arun G

[jcadence]

Legacy workflows that you are now using are not being deprecated, they are being migrated behind the scenes to run on the new automation machine. All net new workflows will be built on the new automation bots as per our previous announcements.

Please let us know if you have any additional questions.