Basic Automation flows not working

Andrew1983

I cannot for the life of me figure out why the most basic automation tasks are not working. I have checked my permissions and I should be getting notifications, but my workflow seems to work very sporadically.

I want the email to be sent to the PM when the "helper box" column is checked just so I can see what the email getting sent to the PM looks like.

When I check and uncheck the "helper box" column, I want that to trigger an email to the PM which contains the fields Item description, Job name, submittal due, and job number.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Andrew Hobby

The reason you are seeing repeated messages is due to the placeholders in your message. This means that the message will look to the specific content for each row and populate that information into {{these}}. Even though rows 1 - 6 have the same content, so the message looks the same, it has the possibility of housing different content per-row, in which case each individual row would have a different message that needs to be included in the email. You can review how placeholders work in this Help Article: Dynamically Add Cell Data in the Subject and Body of Request Messages

Instead, you could include a generic message, like so:

Hello, please review your dates below.

Does that make sense? Let me know if this works for you!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Andrew1983

I was able to get the email to run at a specified time, but now the email has my message to the PM repeated over and over for each row:

Is there a way to get rid of the multiple messages?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Andrew Hobby

The reason you are seeing repeated messages is due to the placeholders in your message. This means that the message will look to the specific content for each row and populate that information into {{these}}. Even though rows 1 - 6 have the same content, so the message looks the same, it has the possibility of housing different content per-row, in which case each individual row would have a different message that needs to be included in the email. You can review how placeholders work in this Help Article: Dynamically Add Cell Data in the Subject and Body of Request Messages

Instead, you could include a generic message, like so:

Hello, please review your dates below.

Does that make sense? Let me know if this works for you!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Andrew1983

@Genevieve P thank you, the documentation on the smartsheet website was a bit unclear. I realized that I was including a placeholder that didn't change per row (the job name) when I should have included the specific date each item needed verifications.

I ended up just taking them out, a simple "These need to be checked" message got the point across.

Genevieve P.

Glad you figured it out! 🙂