Automation is not looking at my Conditions - Checkbox

Jesse Kearley

Hello, I am having an issue with my automations. This sheet is pretty simple, a date column is my trigger and it will shoot off the notification unless a checkbox is checked. The issue is, automations keep coming through despite the checkbox being checked in the sheet, however the email it sends shows the checkbox as unchecked. When I go to the Cell History I can see that the checkbox was checked days before the automation says it isn't.

First Example: This fires off one day after the Date column shown here

Notification showing it sent 4/13/22 (one day after)

The Cell history says it was checked on 04/06/22 and has not changed since.

Automation:

Example 2 on the same sheet, different notification: This one is two days after the date column "Office Depot Kit Order By Date"

Automation:

I checked the sheet for any hidden columns, thinking maybe there were checkboxes unaccounted for with a slightly different name but not luck there either...Thanks, any help would be appreciated!

Jeff Reisman

@Jesse Kearley

I see in the cell history screenshots that the box was unchecked earlier by Smartsheet automation. What other automation is working on that check box? How are the rows created and how are the boxes being checked?

Smartsheet can get touchy about automations based on columns that are being manipulated by other automations, particularly cross-sheet automations.

Jesse Kearley

That is an automation that moves a row from the Master project sheet (a simpler sheet with basic project information) to this sheet so every row in it was added from that Master sheet.

So the row pops in, there are some index/matches looking at that project name and it also matches the install date column. However the install date column is not what I use for my notification's date column, those dates that are seen in the screenshots are all like this [install date] - 35 (this is so we have the product received in 35 days before the install). So no automations are touching any of the columns in these notifications (except when the row arrives), just a formula doing the -35 in the date columns that I mentioned earlier.

Jeff Reisman

That's really weird.

See if it makes a difference if you change the criteria from "is not checked" to "is equal to" 0.

Jesse Kearley

Ok I did that, and now just waiting for another example to see if that fixes it, thank you! 😁

Jesse Kearley

@Jeff Reisman Well I think your fix worked, for some reason or another making the condition as "Equal to 0" instead of "Checkbox is unchecked" worked, I am no longer getting the misfired notifications saying the checkbox is not checked. This seems like a bug so one more question for you... Is there a way to mark the thread as a needed bug fix? I figure that these examples show a pretty convincing case to a development team to look into it more on why checkbox is unchecked is NOT equal to "0" as it should be. The only thing I didn't try was the reverse, so I did not try making the logic "if the checkbox IS checked" to see if the checkbox logic was reversed so to speak but I am sure the dev team will do more tests than I can come up with 😜

Thanks for the help Jeff!

Jeff Reisman

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/327875#Comment_327875

That's crazy that it is working... That was just a shot in the dark!

You can submit a help ticket to support and include the URL to this thread. If your account includes a client development manager person, send them the same information. Smartsheet's first-level support does not "go the extra mile" in figuring things out, so don't expect much in the way of resolution or anything.