Automation: Event trigger by update in "view name"

[_redline]

Hello!

I am trying to execute an Event (let’s call it barEvent) when updates are only made through a particular form view (let’s call it FooForm) without much success. I have my event’s Data change type" set to “UPDATES_ONLY” and tried setting the “Condition” to something along the lines of this:

CONTEXT("View") = "FooForm" 

However, when I monitor the event or bot tied to the event, this never gets triggered (the bot just sends a message to google chat and works fine without any event condition specified). Since I’m using many views, I also tried a simple

CONTAINS(CONTEXT("View"), "Foo")

which should cover any and all views in the app as they’re all named similarly. This also did not allow the event to fire.

The reason that I’m trying to accomplish this through “UPDATES_ONLY” and not "ADD_ONLY" or similar is because the actual row item is added before getting to the FooForm view and I need barEvent to run once and only once when it is edited through FooForm so that theoretically updating the row through another view (i.e. BarForm) would not trigger the event.

I’m open to other methods of conditional values to trigger the event, but the best I could think of is associating the event with a view itself. Please let me know if anything above is unclear of if I could provide any further clarification. Thanks in advance.

[Austin]

I’m not sure that automations would have access to the context(view) since they occur server side.

[_redline]

Thanks for the reply, Austin. Do you know of another way to check against updates of a particular column? I considered including a ChangeCounter to check against but am a little hesitant since the table I’m deriving most of the data from is already pretty wide (97 columns and counting) and don’t think that would be a very extensible approach.

[Marc_Dillon · Accepted solution]

I agree with Austin.

I’d suggest running an Action on the Form Saved Behavior that’ll set some data change somewhere, that you can pick up with the automation’s condition.

[_redline]

Okay, I think I might understand how to handle it now. I could use the Form Saved event to flag a boolean value in some helper column that could be checked against in the event or even have some type of incrementor. Thanks Marc.

[Austin]

If the data table something you control yourself? 97 columns is quiet wide and sounds very cumbersome to work with

[_redline]

Yeah, we tried partitioning the data into their own tables by categories while still referencing the same key to maintain relational information, but the administrator still wishes to go back and modify things by hand in the spreadsheet from time-to-time which could cause an issue with separated tables.

[Steve]

For reference, Form Saved is discussed here:

help.appsheet.com

View Events

View actions can run when certain events happen and help you create custom navigation.