In the screenshot it shows the three options available for a conditional statement on a Dropdown column: “contains all”, “contains one of”, and “contains only”.
We should also have the option for when the Dropdown “does not contain all”, “does not contain one of”, and “is empty”.
My use-case is for input validation. If a user doesn’t select something from the dropdown, but changes the status to “Done”, I want the automation to change the status to “Incomplete”.
So, my pseudo-recipe would read: “When Status changes to Done, and only if Dropdown is empty, set Status to Incomplete.”
There’s many more use-cases for this and more columns that should be supported.
It’s my opinion that the conditional options on a recipe should always include an “if true” and “if not true” option where possible.
I also need this feature! My usecase is a bit different, but I found no other way to do this easily without needing to manually change a dropdown on all our projects.
I created to automation to remind our employees to follow-up with project, one frequently and one less frequently.
I want to have an automatic reminder frequently (every week) with an automation if a dropdown contains “Follow this closely” or has nothing in it (for all our older projects created before I added the dropdown), and another automatic reminder less frequently (every 3 weeks) if the dropdown contains “Follow normally”.
In short, I want to be able to control easily how frequently I will be reminded to check on a project depending on the normal response time, and have a “default” to follow-up frequently.
Good news! There is now an option to conditionally trigger an automation when a column is/is not empty. There is still no option for when a dropdown “does not contain” labels, but you don’t need this one for your scenario.
These are the automations you need to accomplish your three notification schedules:
Trigger
Conditions
Actions
When date arrives,
and only if column is empty,
notify someone,
and only if status is not done,
and then push date by 1 week.
When date arrives,
and only if dropdown contains only “Follow this closely,”
notify someone,
and only if status is not done,
and then push date by 1 week.
When date arrives,
and only if dropdown contains only “Follow normally,”
Thanks for the help! Your idea is great, but for some reason, sub-items columns are not appearing, only item columns!
Since I only need one “follow-up schedule” per sub-item, I tried something else, using Labels instead of a dropdown. The default Label is applied automatically for everything (so I don’t need to manually change all my older projects), so it works great for this, and I can add labels if I want to change to a less or more frequent follow-up schedule.
I still think we should be able to select “is empty” as a choice for dropdowns, but with your help if found something that works.
Thanks for your reply, Charles. No problem at all! It’s nice to know my input helped you find your ideal solution!
Just to clarify, the option for “is empty” is available for all column types, including the dropdown. You just need to choose the option for “column is empty”:
I’m not sure why, but “if column is empty” only let me select columns that are on the item level, not on a sub-item level.
Right now, our data in our main board (with most of our projects) is structured like this:
Groups: Clients names
Items: Projects
Sub-items: Tasks in the project (I want to set the frequency of reminders at this level)
I’m seeing more and more that having a board structured like this is running us into issues, like some things not being feasible with sub-items, or not being able to share part of our board with a client without exposing our entire board. I’m trying to convince my boss to let me change our board to use it more efficiently, but in the meantime, I’m hoping that Monday’s plan to add sub-items under sub-items will come with more flexibility around the automation of sub-items!
