Notification trigger based on email, NOT display name spelling

Tim Starkey

This could probably have a better title. Here is the issue. We have an API that updates rows to sync with our accounting system. One of the fields is a contact field. It pulls an email from the accounting database. So if Bob Builder the contact, it will put in bbuilder@email.com. Even if Bob is in our enterprise contact list, it still displays as his email. FYI - this is problematic to me, and seems to be a recent issue. But not the reason for this post.

We have a notification in each sheet that triggers when a 'new' assignment happens (when there is a change to the contact field). So for the initial row setup (from the API), an email will get sent to bbuilder@email.com.

Now, if I try to fix the name (find replace for example) to display Bob Builder instead of bbuilder@email.com, the notification sees it as a new name, and will send the notification again (new assignment) to Bob, at bbuilder@email.com.

To make it worse…

As I mentioned above, this is new behavior… so we have years of contact names in our sheets. Every time our API sees a change it needs to sync, it updates the row, and overwrites the display name with the email name. So each morning, staff are getting 'new assignment' notifications, only to find out its old, and triggered by a change from their display name to their email. This leaves me with a lot of confused coworkers.