Send notification 10 minutes before appointment

[Ksenia1]

Hey there,

I am looking for a method to automatically send notifications to users 10 minutes before their appointment (saved in a DateTime column).

My idea was to create 6 Bots with the event type scheduled -> Minute of the hour every 10 Minutes (0; 10; 20...) -> ForEachRowInTable active and the Filter condition:
AND(MINUTE([Appointment] - now()) >= 10, MINUTE([Appointment] - NOW()) < 20)

but am not sure if I am on the right path or if there is a smoother solution for it?

Thanks in advance!

[Aurelien]

Hi @Ksenia1 

Your idea makes sense.

In my opinion, you can manage this with only one bot and a serie of branching components.

EVENT CONDITION

TOTALHOURS([datetime]-NOW())<1

PROCESS

A serie of steps with "Wait" then "is less than 10mn?"

with the branching part being:

with expression:

TOTALMINUTES(NOW()-[datetime])<10

and the wait part being:

Attention

Please note I didn't test this.

Let us know if that works for you ! 🙂

[Ksenia1]

This is a great idea @Aurelien, thank you for elaborating! 🙏

As @Alyssa_QREW pointed out in the post below, I am a bit concerned about the mentioned delay that may/will appear in the wait step leading to the notification being sent out too late.

[Alyssa_QREW · Accepted solution]

My concern with using wait is that it is only accurate within 5 minutes according to Appsheet Docs (HERE) so if you do need exactly 10 minutes before it may not work. And in my experience it often takes longer than the 5 minutes the docs say it will. 

If you want it to be more accurate, I would probably stick with the multiple scheduled bots. 

One thing of note, I would use use TOTALMINUTES() in your condition not MINUTE(). Minute would just extract the number in the minute place, total minutes, get you the number of minutes in the duration. Using minutes could cause issues if it is 3 hrs and 10 minutes away because there is 10 minutes in the minutes place.

[Ksenia1]

Thank you for pointing this out @Alyssa_QREW! 

I changed my filter condition to

AND(TOTALMINUTES([Appointment] - now()) >= 10, TOTALMINUTES([Appointment] - NOW()) < 20)