Automation Actions fail on Required columns relying on an Initial Value to fill them

[thethunderbird]

Actions of type “Data: add a new row to another table using values from this row” run just fine (as actions or Workflow rules) as long as all required columns are either a) defined using values in the action or b) have a valid Initial Value column set that fills them automatically. However, if you run an action via an Automation, it won’t run unless you define all of the required columns right in the action.

This is a pretty major bug if Appsheet is going to port all Workflows over to Automations. Here is the kind of error that is reported in the Monitoring dashboard:

Error: Perform DataAction 'Action Name' failed because Row having key 'RowKey' in table 'MyTable' in field 'RequiredButHasValidInitialValueFormula' is required to have a value. Error: 'Add Row' Data action 'Action Name' failed with exception Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.

The action should let the Initial Value column fill the values, otherwise developers will need to maintain formulae for Initial Value and the ones filled in by actions in parallel for data consistency.

[Dan_Bahir]

Calculation of initial values for the add row action has been fixed. Please let me know if you still see this error.

[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

Hi @Dan_Bahir ,

Of late we started facing a similar issue in two daily scheduled automation runs.

2 BOTs that were running for a few months started failing on the errors as below on couple of columns

"Errors": "Error: Row having key '1A2B3C4D' in table 'Some_Table_Name' in field 'An_Enum_List' is required to have a value."

One of the columns is an enumlist with base type as text, the other is decimal type. Both the columns have App formulas ( not initial values) and both columns have values in the rows that we are updating.  The BOT is an edit BOT. Rows are edited for through AppSheet API Webhook.

When I used CONTEXT("Host")<>"Server" in the required_if of these two columns, the workflow was successful.  

So may I know ,

A) is there some change of late that made the BOT(s) to fail on these errors?

B) Is bypassing the Required_if with CONTEXT("Host")<>"Server" in such cases a correct approach or will it have some undesirable impact somewhere else?

[Steve]

Wow.

[Andy_Blatt]

For automating record creation and field requirements, I added a creation timestamp column with an initial value as now to the creation table. I then added a required if on all my required field where the seconds difference between now and the creation timestamp is greater than 5.

Is there a better, more natural way to automatically (bot) create records with required field(s)?

[Marc_Dillon]

Andy_Blatt:

For automating record creation and field requirements, I added a creation timestamp column with an initial value as now to the creation table. I then added a required if on all my required field where the seconds difference between now and the creation timestamp is greater than 5.

In other words, nothing is required during initial creation, but some things are required upon further edits.

It’s a decent way to go about that. If you assume that all record creation is via automation. It’s broken if a user ever creates a record.

Andy_Blatt:

Is there a better, more natural way to automatically (bot) create records with required field(s)?

Is there some reason you’re not filling in the required fields at the time of creation?

[Andy_Blatt]

It is all automation to make the app extremely easy for the users. The pre-populated list of projects they need to update makes it easy to see what’s required from them. Each record is created with the most up to date information daily/weekly/monthly, depending on the type of data required, and then the users are expected to populate the required fields in order to continue the process. I could require the user to click the form button and provide an ever shrinking dropdown list of projects they need to update, but being able to pre-create the list enables better adoption as part of the ease of use.