I have two boards. The first is a high-level “Request” board. Users fill out a form on this board detailing their requests to the Marketing department, and that creates an item in the Request board. As an example, a request might come in to create an ebook. When it does, the marketing person responsible for producing ebooks will review the item, and if satisfied it contains all the information they need, then they’ll change its status to “Approved”.
Once the item is approved, I have an automation that creates a new “Process” board from a template. The Process board has a mirror column that synchronizes with the Request board and pulls over the name of the user who submitted the initial request.
When some of the tasks on the Process board are marked “Done”, I want to send an automatic notification to the user listed in that mirror column. Since they submitted the initial request, I want to inform them of the item’s milestone so they’re kept up-to-date through the process.
Here’s my problem.
I just learned that you can’t perform automations (such as automatic notifications) on mirror columns. Does anyone have any advice on a workaround?
I think there is a workaround that would work great in this case.
I see that the items on the “Process” board are already connected to the related “Request” board item, so that you can mirror the username information. That is a good start.
Firstly, I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “username”. Are you mirrorring a “People” column value, or a text value? Because in order for us to send automatic bell notifications inside monday.com (with a dynamic recipient), we need a People column.
What we can do instead is the following:
Instead of mirroring the username, mirror a new “Status” column instead. You will need to create it in the “Request” board, and mirror it over to the “Process” board. You can call it something like “Requester Notification Status”, and have it’s values be either “Not notified” and “Notified”.
Install an app called General Caster. You will need the paid version of it, since writing to mirror columns is a premium feature.
On the “Process” board, install a new General Caster integration. Select the integration that says “When status changes to something, perform formula and cast result to mirrored column”.
Configure it so when the process’ task status changes to “Done”, set mirror column status value to “Notified”
On the “Request” board, set an automation so that when the “Requester Notification Status” changes to “Notified”, notify “Requester” (Needs to be a people column)
This way, when tasks on your “Process” board are marked as “Done” and they’re connected to the original request item, they’ll trigger a notification to the original requester.
This is what I could come up with given the limited info provided, so let me know if that helps!
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To clear up any confusion I may have caused, here’s what I meant by “username” which is synonymous with “Requestor”:
Request Board: Requestor is a People column
Process Board: Requestor is a Mirror column, pulling from the Request Board’s People column
I couldn’t figure out any other way to semi-automatically pull down the requestor’s name who submitted the initial request.
I took a quick look at the General Caster website and it leaves me wondering - is there no way to accomplish what I’m trying to do within Monday.com? Is this going to require a 3rd-party integration?