Automations can be tricky. There are some rules to the way that they work. You can often find those rules in articles on our Help Center, but I thought it might be helpful to write here as well about one rule in particular.
Every automation and integration recipe has a trigger and an action (or multiple actions). For example: “When a Status changes to Done, delete the item” In this case, the trigger is “When a Status changes to Done”. The action is “delete the item”. So, every time that an item is deleted, one action is used.
Some recipes can have multiple actions. Take this one for example: “When Date arrives set Status to In progress and assign Cassandra as Point Person”
One thing I often see lead to confusion (and rightfully so!) is the idea of where the actions occur when setting up a recipe with multiple actions.
Put simply, all actions will occur on the item or subitem where the trigger takes place.
So, for example, with the recipe above, on the item where the date arrives, the status will change to “In progress” and Cassandra will be assigned to the Point Person column. All actions will take place in that item only.
Can you also explain if multiple automations are assigned to a single column (lets say a status field with multiple automations are triggered based on a status = “done”) what order the automations are triggered in?
@PolishedGeek is right! Currently, there’s no way to control the order of multiple automations. Single column or not, we can consider the order random. It’s a long term goal though! The team wasn’t able to give me a definitive timeline, but they did say that they are working on it. So there’s hope for the future!
Thank you @cassandra . This would be a very welcome improvement as the randomness of the automations causes a lot of headaches. I look forward to hearing updates on this in the future.
