Update Groups Colors... finally... but there's a trick

monday Apps & Developers
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Hi Everyone !

It’s been a year that I wanted to set colors for my groups with the API and I read several posts here requesting that feature and replies saying that “Ehh… sorry that’s not available”. :wink:
And this morning, I wanted to check again and saw that the API documentation was updated with this sample code :

*mutation {*
*  update_group (board_id: 12345678, group_id: "today", group_attribute: color, new_value: "red") { *
*    id*
*  } *
*}*

So… I was super happy and excited to try…
I quickly wrote a piece of code to get the Groups properties of my Board dedicated to experimentations and parsed them to see how it looked.

Turned out that the API sends me my groups colors in hexadecimal :

string(285) "{"data":{"boards":[{"groupsapitests":[{"id":"xxx","title":"GRP1_GREEN","color":"#00c875","position":"256.0"},{"id":"xxx","title":"GRP2_BLUE","color":"#579bfc","position":"512.0"},{"id":"xxx","title":"GRP3_RED","color":"#BB3354","position":"1024.0"}]}]},"account_id":xxx}"

“color”:“#00c875” for a medium green previously selected manually in the Monday’s limited palette,
“#579bfc” for a blue and “#BB3354” for a dark red.
There, I thought : “Ah niiiice, that’s cool, I’ll probably be able to set my own colors, in hexadecimal, in order to use my company’s graphic charter”… but no… not at all :

"error_message":"Input color is not in colors options"

And that, even If I try to set the same colors (“#00c875”, “#579bfc”, “#BB3354”) that the API initially gave me… WTF??

Then, I tried with W3C color names, given that the Doc’s example used “red” to specify the color change, and it worked with basic “blue”, “green” and “red”…
Guess what ? :grin:
I tried with other W3C names for nicer colors, for example :
“chartreuse”, “cornflowerblue”, “crimson” and… No… it didn’t work either… same error message :

"error_message":"Input color is not in colors options"

So… It looks that we’re in the middle of the bridge…
We’re now able to set/change Groups colors but with a very limited range of colors… and I didn’t find anywhere the complete list of those “authorized” colors.
I don’t understand the reason why the API is able to work and set colors in hexadecimal for itself but prevent us to do it too… Come on… we’re talking about “colors” to make our Boards looking good !
There’s no security issue here…

It’s too bad because we’re almost there… Please @monday open that feature to let us choose our own colors and a ton of people/customers here will be happy ! #100%guaranteed

If anyone has more info, I’m of course interested !!

Have a great day !

Pierre.

1 Like
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Hello there @pczeryba!

Thank you for the feedback.

I have shared this with our R&D team so that they can take it into account, and also with our team in charge of documentation, to see if we can add the valid colors to it.

Thank you again :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers,
Matias

1 Like
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Hi @pczeryba!

Just wanted to let you know that we’ve updated the documentation to include the list of accepted colors.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

Best,
Rachel

2 Likes
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Hello Rachel !
Thank you and my boards will thank you too in a few days when they will benefit from those new colors that I’ll finally be able to control.
Colors might be considered as a small thing but when we talk about “executive” boards that are watched every day, being consistent and having somehow a “color language”, is very important !
So, thank you again !

For those who will read this message who want to take a quick look, here are those colors :

1262×1164 21.2 KB

Best regards.

Pierre.

1 Like
5

Here they are in text…

“dark-green”
“orange”
“blue”
“red”
“green”
“grey”
“dark-blue”
“purple”
“yellow”
“lime-green”
“brown”
“dark-red”
“trolley-grey”
“dark-purple”
“dark-orange”
“dark-pink”
“turquoise”
“light-pink”

Also, @Matias.Monday, @rachelatmonday, “dark-red” does not work. It acts like “trolley-grey”.

Jim - The Monday Man
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@JCorrell thanks for pointing this out. I have let our R&D time know!

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Hello everyone !

Little ping about that topic.

If I delete and recreate my groups (which is one of my needs), applying colors, it doesn’t work…
After the Groups creation, I request their list to get their new IDs and set a fixed color (red, blue, green) but the colors applied are… random…
If I put the exact same “Change Colors” code in another page and call it separately one minute later then it works…
It’s like there would be a delay or something that prevents to change Groups colors right after their creation.

Pierre.

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Hello @pczeryba,

Would it be possible for you to share script/screenshots/screenrecording of the queries and mutations with a step-by-step you are taking here?

It sounds interesting and it would be very good for us to understand the exact flow to evaluate the possible issue.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,
Matias

9

There is some sort of propagation delay on groups after creation esp. by API.

I’ve seen 404 errors trying to move/create items in a new group, where it says the group is not found. Seems the group is created in one database cluster and it takes time for it to replicate to all clusters. When I then create the item, it hits a cluster that hasn’t received the new group yet, and part of the create_item is it verifies the groups existence and finds out its not there (yet). This is speculation on the mechanism of the issue, but its most obvious theory to me.

12

Hi @Matias.Monday tias !

I have the same feeling that @codyfrisch .
I think it’s a sync issue about data replication between servers.
I tried again to create a new group in a board and change its color right away in the same script.
It doesn’t work.
I have to postpone the “colors change” to something like 10-15 min later and then it works.
So that’s what I do now. I have a series of Cron tasks that process the data and, later, a different script that handle the colors change.

In a general way, lately I see more and more issues like that, about data not refreshed or error messages saying “your last action hasn’t been taken in account”… It’s annoying… and I started to question the reliability of the platform given that I also see some “missed actions”.
I ask to delete a series of Groups and… most of them are deleted but not ALL of them… and that breaks my workflow…

13

Little ping about the Colors.

When we add a Status column in a Group, we can create Labels which can use a color.
That list of colors is bigger than the one for the Groups… Why ?

Status_Labels_Colors_Vs_Groups_Colors

And see… my colleagues love using those Labels colors but now I would like to apply them to my groups to notify, for example, that if a line’s status changed, that has an impact on the whole group and then I need to change and apply the same color to the group.
That’s a typical scenario I have but currently, I can’t do that.

So, again, to gain in consistency, that would be great that you could offer the same colors palettes everywhere and that you add some documentation about it on the API side.

14

Hello everyone,

I tried replicating what you mentioned and could not do it.

I tried creating a new board and a second later change the color or add an item to it and it is working well in my tests.

Would you be able to send a timestamp when this was not working for you? You can do it here or to appsupport@monday.com. We would need your account ID, board ID, ID of the created group, location, date, hour, minute and the mutation you used and the response you got. With that information, we can take a look into our logs to check what we can find.

Regarding the colors of the groups, you can find the available colors in our documentation. I will suggest to add the colors you can find for statuses, so that they are all available for groups as well :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers,
Matias

16

Hello @Matias.Monday !

Sorry to come back to you late…

Did you do your tests manually on the front end interface or, like us, remotely through the API ?
From the WebSite, applying a color change is instantly done and well… sometimes I get an error message saying “Monday couldn’t do the operation”… and have to do it twice, but through the API, it really takes some time…
The question is : Can the API be affected by our location ?
I’m based in France, maybe my Monday account is on European servers while the API might be called and triggered from the US and that creates some sync issues.

I have a CRON job running who has to change the colors of 90 groups in a board.
I thought it could be done quickly because that doesn’t sound overkill to change a color setting but the reality is that it takes 51min !!?? It’s a PHP page called every day that uses the API.

Monday_API_ChangeColors
Monday_API_ChangeColors1888×126 48.6 KB

And for other things too, like create a bunch of groups, the API is super slow and less and less reliable given that several times a week, I see issues with API calls not executed correctly.

I would appreciate a chat/discussion about the best practices regarding relatively large amounts of data sent and check if something can be improved because honestly I don’t see myself spending time everyday to check if my processes are completely well executed or not and if all of my data has really arrived on Monday.
I love Monday’s interface to use it manually.
But here, I need to trust the platform’s API for my automated workflow and currently… I have doubts Matias.

Thanks in advance.

Best regards.

Pierre.

17

Hello again @pczeryba,

Your location should not affect the use of the API.

Would you be able to please send an email to appsupport@monday.com so we can take this from there? Please add the same picture you sent here + your account ID, board ID, location, date, hour, minute and the mutation you used and the response you got. With that information, we can take a look into our logs to check what we can find. But we need this to be a ticket because it looks like we might need to do some investigation.

Looking forward to hearing from you over there!

Cheers,
Matias

1 Like
18

Hello!
I can’t found here a color selected on the group color palette below (like dark-yellow).
Is is possible to set it by name?
darkyellow

19

Hello there @alexanderm,

As of today, the color codes that you see in the link you sent, are the ones you can use to update a group’s color via API.

I will take this with the team in charge of this so that they can add this color in the future.

Let me know if you have any other questions :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers,
Matias

1 Like