Workflow invalid issue

Karen Webber

Hi all, I have a new (and recurring) issue with certain workflows suddenly becoming invalid. For the most part they are not complicated (see example - simple date record when a status changes), and before this year they seemed to work fine. When I re-enable this one, for instance, it will work for a couple of weeks before suddenly disabling itself again.

I realise it's difficult to assess without knowing all the workflows that work in tandem, but I am wondering whether anyone's experienced similar issues recently and had a sudden epiphany about solutions?

As an aside, does anyone map their automations in any way to keep track of them, and if so, what system do you use? I'm running 40+ on some sheets, and it's increasingly difficult to keep track of potential conflicts. I think an automated mapping would be amazing (I've submitted an enhancement request) but it seems unlikely.

Soumitra Bhowmick

I am facing these issues every day. I have raised ticket with Smartsheet support team, though they came up with some answers but that doesn't apply to many of the cases.
Their answer was, if one of your automation make any changes to the sheet which might have been used as trigger for any other Automation, in case the first automation is getting triggerd excessively, Smartsheet automatically disables the second Automation to prevent looping error or anything of that sort.

Now I have cases where some automations gets disbales automatically which are supposed to get triggered when a new row gets added to the sheet.

In nutshell, Smartsheet doesn't seems to have any solution for this known bug in their product. You have to deal with it and rely on emails that you get when any automation gets disabled, to be informed and activate them manually.

Karen Webber

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/477233#Comment_477233

Thanks Soumitra. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was going to be the type of issue - let's hope they fix it soon.

Toufong Vang

@Karen Webber, have you looked into consolidating some of your workflows? If a change in the "Status" cell is used as a trigger in other workflows (e.g., send alert, notification, update request, change a cell value, etc.), then consider consolidating them. Use conditions to filter the rows and conditional paths to perform the different actions. Some actions can be stacked and have conditions and conditional paths, too.

In the example you shared, I would configure the trigger to "When 'Status' changes to 'Any Value'" and put "Approval pending (LM), Approval pending (BH),..." into the condition (e.g., "When 'Status' is one of..."). Add conditional paths and subsequent conditions if the status change requires other actions.

[I]f one of your automation make any changes to the sheet which might have been used as trigger for any other Automation...

@Soumitra Bhowmick, I am confused by Smartsheet Support's response. Except for "Generate document", automations (workflow actions) cannot trigger another automated workflow within the same sheet. For example, recording a date into a cell would not cause another workflow to run.

I can see how a manual trigger can create conflict among workflows. For this reason, I group all of the possible actions that a manual change will trigger into one workflow.

Best regards!

Karen Webber

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/477299#Comment_477299

Thanks Toufong, I'll take another look at whether the same trigger is present in more than one workflow (this is where it would have been really lovely to be able to generate a system summary of workflows) - it just seems to be a very random error.

In terms of Soumitra's comment, workflow results can definitely be chained or result in others. For the date example I might choose to have a document generated depending on the date completion plus conditions.