Struggling with scheduled reporting!

Gerhard_Viljoen · 10-05-2021 02:52 AM

Hi guys,

I used to have my weekly reports sent from slices in my apps and it worked fine. I migrated to the bots system now and my test mails work with my templates but they don’t seem to send at the times scheduled.

I’ve created a bot with these two elements:

This is the event:

If I press the “Run” button it fires the email specified in the “Process” and all works perfect but it never triggers on time on a weekly basis.

Please help?

Aurelien

Hi @Gerhard_Viljoen

Usually this happens when app is not deployed.
Is it so ?

Gerhard_Viljoen

Hi,

Yes it has been deployed for very long. As I mentioned, all worked fine until we moved over to Bots…

Gerhard_Viljoen

Also, I tried the option for “each row in the given table” and selected the same table in the process and event. And then I get this message when I save it:

“The event and process of the ‘Weekly Report Bot’ Bot are not compatible. The output of event ‘Weekly Friday Trigger’ and the input of the process ‘New process’ must be the same table or ‘None’ in the case of a scheduled event that is not ‘For Each Row’.”

Aurelien

That’s very weird.

I suggest you contact the support here:
https://www.appsheet.com/Support/Contact

Gerhard_Viljoen

No response yet and it has been two days…
Very frustrating as the main purpose of this app is to act on the automated reports on a weekly basis!

Aurelien

Did you get a response from the support team?

Gerhard_Viljoen

I have received a chat. Slow to respond though. I had a previous issued no one could help me with and they basically told me to rebuild the App… Hope we can fix this without such a response.
To be honest, I have had to contact Appsheet’s support numerous times in the past two years and it is a real drag to get things sorted.

1minManager

In general I’ve found the whole support situation slowed down alot once Google took over

Gerhard_Viljoen

And I don’t feel like the fee we pay per user is so little that we are not to expect proper support?!

Steve

Escalated.

Gerhard_Viljoen

Further to this issue.
In both my apps where I run this process by pressing “run” instead of the weekly trigger doing its job, I get three emails and in in the other four emails of the same kind in one batch, all identical (and correct)???
Honestly. Either I’m missing something substantial here or the bots are littered with bugs.

Steve

Automation is needlessly complex.

Anthony_Nel

@Gerhard_Viljoen I had the same issues after migrating, and I got the bots to fire on schedule after I made trivial changes to the scheduling times e.g. change the time from 5:15 am to 5:16 am - and then save the app changes. Also you might want to check if you used expressions for any email recipients - the appsheet upgrade process changed mine from expressions to text??? - click on the formula and it will change from black to blue indicating it is now a formula and then save. HTH

Gerhard_Viljoen

Thanks Anthony. I overhauled all the old events as they weren’t working once the bots took over. And none of them on either of my apps have been working correctly. I tried your suggestions but to no avail…

Anthony_Nel

My suggestion (while you are waiting for support to respond ???) - is rebuild them from scratch - I have had no issues with Bots that started life as Bots (so far that is!)

Steve

That’s my impression, too.

That’s my impression.

Anthony_Nel

Agree Steve ! I have an outstanding issue first logged with Appsheet on 7 May which is still not resolved !!! Support went from 1st class to almost non-existent unless you complain …

Gerhard_Viljoen

Hi All. I’m still nowhere.

I rebuilt the process again. If I select the “for each row in the table” it sends separate emails for each entry. I only figured that out now.

But my template takes all the records in a slice and includes them in one email. I can’t select a table when I don’t select the “for each row in the table” but I get an error message if I select the table in the email task (I am forced to select a table, which makes sense): "The output of event ‘Periodic Trigger (test 2)’ and the input of the process ‘New process’ must be the same table or ‘None’ in the case of a scheduled event that is not ‘For Each Row’."

I am at a serious loss here. Please help me see what is probably very obvious or suggest how I should address Appsheet support.

Regards
Gerhard

Steve

Attn @Dan_Bahir @Zhifeng_Lin

Zhifeng_Lin

Hi Gerhard,

If I understand your use case correctly, you will want to do the following –

for the scheduled event configuration, don’t enable “For Each Row In Table”
for the associated process config, select “None” as the table
for the email task config, select the table that your slice is derived from
The email template is referencing your slice directly (and that is compatible with its “parent” table), so that should work

Thanks!

Gerhard_Viljoen

Thanks for this helpful tip. Not very intuitive but I followed it.

Once again, as with my original issue. There are no errors when setting this up. And when I run the Bot it sends the email. But on both apps I have tried this, it refuses to trigger the process at the set time. The only thing I can change still is the “condition” in the Event and whether it is empty or simply “True” it makes no difference. Am I missing something in the Condition field?

Thanks.

Anthony_Nel

PS Gerhard is your app in the deployed state?

Gerhard_Viljoen

Hi Anthony,

Yes, they have been deployed for a long time already and the previous reports worked. Also the events that are not driven by schedules seem to work (those triggered by events)

Guillermo

Hi @Zhifeng_Lin I am following your steps, but it throw me errors not finding some of the fields that are on the table. Im not understanding anything and its been 2 years using appsheet daily. I consider myself an advanced user.

Could you help me here? Thans in advance!

Zhifeng_Lin

Hi Guillermo,

could you share some more details here?
What are you trying to achieve and what are the table(s) structure?

Thanks!

Gerhard_Viljoen

Update

@Zhifeng_Lin seems to have found the source of the problem:

It seems as though me using the SnapShot expression/function for graphs in both reports causes this issue. He says that there has been regression that causes the SnapShot functionality not to work correctly with scheduled bots.

At least now I know I was not going crazy…

Aurelien

@Gerhard_Viljoen

Good to know !!! Thanks for keeping us updated.
Do you have a workaround for it ?

Gerhard_Viljoen

Hi all. So the bug is fixed and my reports started sending again at the scheduled times.

A big thanks to @Zhifeng_Lin for helping me in this regard. The bug is fixed.

Anthony_Nel

Hi - you say its fixed - did they fix Snapshot to work with Bots? or are the 2 functions still incompatible?

Gerhard_Viljoen

Sorry for the late reply. No they are working fine now.

Anthony_Nel

Thanks for the update.