There is some serious disconnect between Workflows and Formulas/Functions.
I use Smartsheet mostly for task management on a small software development team. When we submit a code change it must go through multiple steps in this case: Development, Testing, Code Merge, and a few other tasks.
I want to create a form that allows one user to write a generic ticket that will open a new ticket for each of these different steps. This would save my team probably 15 minutes per task as most of the data will be the same.
Now here are the problems that I've encountered trying to automate something as simple as this:
- It requires a second sheet to create multiple tasks
- Even when using a second sheet automation will only create 2 tasks before disabling the workflow. This is the response I received after my workflow was disabled "This workflow triggered itself directly or by at least 1 other workflow, which is prevented"
- I am not able to reference a value from another row using workflows for example: setting a cell to " =[TaskName]1 + " Development" " outside of workflows will turn into "Name Development" but when used within workflows there is an " ' " added before the = in order to disable the formula.
For problems 1 & 2 the only answer I've seen on here is @Andrée Starå suggesting a very vague solution. He does not share the solution on these forums and instead requests emails from individuals in order for him to share an example. I don't see how the CEO is unable to post an example on the community board when prompted multiple times.
How can tasks be split without encountering an issue with workflows calling themselves? How can we get formulas to work in workflows and if this isn't possible, how do we concatenate values submitted in forms with other values (either from the form itself or hardcoded values)?